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After a career of working, scrimping and saving, many retirees are well prepared financially to stop earning a living. But how do you find meaning, identity and purpose in the remaining years of your life? John and Kathryn Gee, both 57, recently engaged in this existential query. They have worked hard at well paying technology related jobs, invested diligently and are planning to retire soon. Having relocated to San Antonio from Phoenix in 2010, they have already reached a sweet spot where they have a bountiful nest egg. Yet they worry that something is missing. "We thought we'd be retired and would be fat, dumb and happy at 55," Mr. Gee said. "We only talked about money. Then we started asking some simple questions." Embracing the guiding principles of life planning laid out by a financial planner, George Kinder, the Gees asked themselves what they would do if money wasn't an issue and they only had one day to a few years left to live. The answers, which they are still contemplating, gave them a renewed focus on what was most important to them. "What is it that can make me a better person?" Ms. Gee asked herself after a re examination of their core values. "How can we give back? Family became more important." Mr. Kinder, who has been espousing and refining life planning programs with his clients and in seminars for several decades, calls for a process that involves self, family and community. "Who do I want to be?" is a question that Mr. Kinder says his clients should ask. "What have I missed? Who did I not get to be? What an incredible opportunity to have all of these things in front of you." As with financial preparation, life planning evolves in stages. Mr. Kinder says he walks clients through exploration of positive outcomes and goal setting "within a human setting of comfort and support." If the process unfolds in a positive way, Mr. Kinder says, the ideal state is one of the Hawaiian word "aloha." The term does not simply mean hello or goodbye, he says, but in the truest sense stands for "the process of passing a blessing from one person to another." Mitch Anthony, author of "The New Retirementality" (Wiley, 2008), says your self evaluation should start with the question, "What am I wired for?" which involves taking an "inventory of who you are." Mr. Anthony's principles are geared around one's aptitudes and having active pursuits that involve the mind, body and spirit. Translating that into concrete actions can be challenging. Retired professionals may be able to continue to do what they were doing, but now as part timers or consultants. Others may be able to apply their analytic, management or organizational skills in low stress, time flexible settings. Still others may want to strike out in entirely new directions. "It's never an easy answer," Mr. Anthony says of self discernment in retirement. "You need to take stock of things that resound with you that stir you up." Locast, a nonprofit streaming service for local TV, is shutting down Capital One's chief executive was fined after being called a 'repeat offender.' Through Mr. Anthony's process of discovering engagement, it is possible to isolate the activities that you are already doing or could be doing that make you feel most alive, creative, happy and connected to others. Finding a balance between the myriad components of our lives certainly takes some adjustment. Mary Zimmerman, a financial and life planner in the Phoenix area who has worked with the Gees, said one of the most important goals she discussed with them was to "find your humanity and sanity." "There's often so much anxiety in retirement," Ms. Zimmerman says. "How do we allow ourselves to be at ease? How can we be comfortable?" These questions lead into an exploration of what makes us tick and how we can find our best selves. By no means is this a seamless transition for most. The rough patches may come early and often. It's hard to break the routine and inertia of a career. You may have to become a "lite" version of your career focused self to bridge the gap. Like many, Ms. Gee says that her self esteem and identification were intimately linked to her work, a common problem with retirees seeking a new role. Some professionals find it unnervingly difficult not to be a banker, doctor, lawyer or engineer anymore. "The myth of retirement is that you have to leave that all behind," Mr. Anthony said. You don't. Once you shatter the conventions of a do nothing retirement, Mr. Anthony says, it's like "breaking through the gravity barrier. You're on the path to contentment." Admittedly, seeking what Viktor Frankl, a Holocaust survivor who was a renowned neurologist and psychiatrist, called the "will to meaning" is one of the most challenging parts not just of retirement planning but of living your life to the fullest. You don't have to do it alone, though. You can find a coach, mentor or life planner. Consider a certified life coach, who, like a planner, works one on one to help you walk through a life plan Mr. Kinder's organization, Kinder Institute, also has a search engine to find life planners throughout the world. Rates for this service vary from as little as 200 to as much as 10,000 a month for high end executive coaches. Some retirees may have a clear idea of how they want to define their lives while others may take months to discern a path. Certified financial planners may also provide this assistance in the course of comprehensive hourly or flat fee financial planning. The universe of financial planners who have had specific life planning or life coaching training, though, is small. To date, about 2,000 planners have taken the Kinder Institute's training and 350 have qualified for the registered life planner designation. That's out of an industry of more than 74,000 professionals holding the certified financial planning certificate. Even if you find the process emotionally nettlesome most do you can figure out life goals on your own and create your route for finding purpose and meaning. One way to start is by asking if there's a need for your service within your family or community. You may spend time with relatives who need you in a caregiving or educational role. Another approach is to cherry pick some community activities that you feel most comfortable with and that provide social engagement as well. Others seek out social, environmental or political causes or a nonprofit activity that revolves around doing good, not just doing well. Sometimes the quest for inner meaning may be right in front of you. For Mr. Gee, it was family that called to him. He wanted to help a niece and spend time with his mother, who is 86, infirm and living alone in his native England. She could not relocate to the United States. Let's be honest: Those pursuing the life planning process tend to be financially secure already. You can't be nimble with life decisions if you are constantly worried that market volatility will blister your investments. That's why it's important to thoroughly vet your portfolio, estate plan and cash needs. A certain level of comfort is almost a keystone for most people before embarking on an existential exploration. Once you cross that barrier, though, almost anything is possible. "It's not about being busy," Mr. Anthony said. "It's about being engaged." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Your Money |
How to Get the Most Out of Your Digital Wallet None | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
Since 2010, the organization Elastic City has hosted free, artist led walking tours that move through urban spaces in unconventional ways. Whether taking tiny steps through Stuyvesant Town or using plastic bags as pillows on the pavement in Union Square, participants are invited to be curious, playful pedestrians. Calling these excursions "dances" might be a stretch, but they're often guided by choreographers concerned with ideas of seeing and being seen. The seventh and final Elastic City festival, the Last Walks, begins on Thursday, July 7, with "Their Shoes," a tour of Tompkins Square Park in the East Village devised by the dance and sculpture artist Aki Sasamoto. Ms. Sasamoto is interested not just in people watching, which offers some of New York's finest theater, but in empathizing with the people being watched. Her walk, which repeats on July 12 and 14, promises to employ what she calls "peripheral viewing" and nonconfrontational "mimicking exercises" in relation to passers by, as she promotes observing without disrupting. (elastic city.org.) | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
There are several impressive candidates in the race. But coalescing Democratic support around Mr. Torres is especially important because of the presence of Ruben Diaz Sr. on the ballot. Mr. Diaz, a City Council member and former state senator, is running as a Democrat, but talks and acts like a pro Trump Republican. Mr. Diaz has spent much of his long political career fighting against equal rights for women and gay people. He has complained that the City Council is "controlled by the homosexual community," and described those who support a woman's right to choose as "murderers, assassins and criminals." Polls show that Mr. Diaz may be poised to win the Democratic primary, which is tantamount to election in November. His lead in the polls is in part the result of an unusually large field of Democrats vying to replace Representative Jose Serrano, who is retiring. With liberal and mainstream Democrats divided, Mr. Diaz has found an opening. Also helping him is the fact that he shares a name with his son, Ruben Diaz Jr., the Bronx borough president and a popular mainstream Democrat in city politics. An independent poll from Data for Progress, a liberal think tank, showed Mr. Diaz leading the crowded race with the support of only 22 percent of likely voters. The best way to stop him is by voting for Mr. Torres, an accomplished two term councilman and the first openly gay person to hold elected office in the borough, who has served his constituents with distinction. Mr. Torres is trailing Mr. Diaz only slightly, and has the support of 20 percent of likely voters, according to the Data for Progress poll. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Opinion |
Jerry Harris, the breakout star of the Emmy winning Netflix series "Cheer" who was arrested last week and charged with producing child pornography, will remain in custody, a court decided on Monday. His lawyer waived both his detention and preliminary hearings at a 10 minute hearing in a federal court in Chicago. Mr. Harris, who dialed into the hearing by phone, was represented by three lawyers, who appeared in person in the courtroom. His lead lawyer, Todd Pugh, asked the judge to postpone a decision about whether Mr. Harris will be released on bond, saying he did not yet have a plan for where Mr. Harris could stay if he were released. The judge, Sunil R. Harjani, asked Mr. Harris if he understood that his lawyer was waiving his right and that he would be in custody until a plan is in place, at which time he could ask the court to consider releasing him on bond. Judge Harjani ordered that Mr. Harris remain in custody in Chicago until a next hearing, which had not been scheduled. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
WHAT IS IT? Two seat supercar. HOW MUCH? Base 92,705 including 1,700 gas guzzler tax. (Dual graphite painted stripes are 3,425 more.) Neither traction nor stability controls are offered. IS IT FAST? It is seriously, wickedly, shockingly quick. If yours won't get from 0 to 60 m.p.h. in less than four seconds, there's something wrong with it. IS IT THIRSTY? The E.P.A. rating is 13 m.p.g. in town, 22 on the highway. But if you use the throttle as intended, those numbers will dive into the single digits. THE Dodge Viper coupe rattles, is impossible to enter or exit gracefully, has side exiting exhaust pipes that burn if you brush against them and comes with chintzy interior trim much of which feels as if it's about to break off in your hand. The shifter for the 6 speed manual transmission is so stiff it feels as if it should be towed into gear by a team of oxen, the huge tires tram disconcertingly over pavement imperfections and the ride is stiff enough to shatter the most supple coccyx. Of course there's no real room for cargo, the outward visibility is crummy and the driver and passenger sit in what amount to uncomfortably narrow channels gouged out between the thick center tunnel and the tall, wide door sills. But the Viper wears all those vices as virtues. After 19 years, it remains the most uncompromised production supercar ever built by a major manufacturer. It's ferocious where Ferraris are sophisticated. Raw in all the ways that Porsches are refined. And it's as demanding as the Corvette is coddling. The Viper's V 10 engine, based on the architecture of an old Chrysler V 8, features a throwback valve train with a single in block camshaft and 20 pushrods to operate the 20 overhead valves. But by dint of its enormous 8.4 liter displacement it delivers 600 horsepower at 6,100 r.p.m. and, more impressive, a cranium compressing 560 pound feet of torque at 5,000 r.p.m. Even at idle this engine rocks on its mounts with menacing muscle; blip the throttle and the whole chassis seems to twist. Launching a Viper takes some subtlety since so much power can overwhelm the rear tires even though they're huge P345/30ZR19 Michelin Pilot Sport PS2 radials about as close to racing rubber as original equipment tires can be. Once the car is moving, it seems almost to compress around you. With so much power available, the Viper seems to squirm over the tires at every gear change. According to Insideline.com, the SRT 10 will catapult to 60 m.p.h. in just 3.9 seconds and thunder through the quarter mile in 11.7 seconds at just over 127 m.p.h. The driver will be lucky to take a breath during the trip. On the road the Viper delivers the sensation of infinite grip. There isn't much steering feel from the Michelin tires in the front (P275/35ZR8), but the car reacts with a suddenness and determination that's startling. But the grip isn't infinite and the Viper's rear end will break free suddenly when its limits have been exceeded. At that moment you need the reflexes of a Foyt, Andretti or Senna to recover. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Automobiles |
This spring's college graduates face better job prospects than the dismal environment encountered by last year's grads. But that doesn't mean the job market is thriving. Average starting salaries are down, and employers plan to make only 5 percent more job offers to new graduates this spring compared to last spring, when job offers were down 20 percent from 2008 levels, according to a study by the National Association of Colleges and Employers, which tracks recruitment data. Liam O'Reilly, who just graduated from the University of Maryland with a bachelor's degree in history, said he had applied to 50 employers to be a paralegal, a researcher for a policy organization, an administrative assistant but he had gotten hardly any interviews. While continuing to search for something he truly wants, he has taken a minimum wage job selling software that includes an occasional commission. "Had I realized it would be this bad, I would have applied to grad school," Mr. O'Reilly said. The study by the National Association of Colleges and Employers found that 24 percent of 2010 college graduates who applied for a job have one waiting after graduation, up from 20 percent last year. But the average salary offered to graduates with a bachelor's degree has slipped 1.7 percent from last year, to 47,673. Salaries for finance majors rose 1.6 percent, to 50,546, while those for liberal arts majors fell 8.9 percent, to 33,540. For graduates with computer related degrees, salary offers rose 5.8 percent, to 58,746. Patricia Rose, director of career services at the University of Pennsylvania, said that students had more choices this year. "Last year, people found employment, but there was a sense of musical chairs, that if there's an empty seat, take it," she said. "This year, there's a little more sense of ease." Persistence, connections and credentials in hot fields like finance and computer science are especially helpful, say economists and college officials. Jenna Alt, newly graduated from the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, N.Y., applied for 20 jobs in construction management in New York beginning last fall, but came up empty handed. While she was attending a tennis party at her aunt's house, she said, "A friend of my aunt's said, 'You seem like an intelligent young lady. One of my brother's friends owns a construction company in D.C.' " "Companies are returning to campus, and they're confidently hiring," said Andrew Stern, a Penn graduate and Deloitte employee. Fabrizio Costantini for The New York Times Thanks to that referral, Ms. Alt will join Clark Construction in the Washington area in September, and she feels grateful. "Only about a third of my friends have jobs lined up after graduation," she said. "If you have a job, you're lucky." College officials say there is more of that luck going around this year. "We've seen glimmers of hope," said Thomas C. Devlin, director of the career center at the University of California, Berkeley. "There's been a steady but gradual uptick in employer activity." Economists are less upbeat than college officials, however, and the possibility of a double dip recession is a growing concern. Some economists worry that the uptick in job offers might peter out if the economy stalls because of the stock market turmoil and the financial chaos in Europe. Thomas J. Nardone, an assistant commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, said that the jobless rate for college graduates under age 25 was 8 percent in April, up from 6.8 percent in April 2009 and 3.7 percent in April 2007, before the recession began. The 8 percent unemployment rate is lower than the nation's overall 9.9 percent jobless rate, but it is high for college graduates, who typically have a lower unemployment rate than those without bachelor's degrees. Mr. Nardone noted that for high school graduates under age 25 who did not enroll in college, the jobless rate was 24.5 percent last month, up from 11.4 percent in April 2007. When the academic year started, many employers were pessimistic because of the recession and decided to send fewer recruiters to campus. But with the economy picking up, some companies are making more job offers than they had expected just a few months ago. "I'd call it a just in time job market," said Thomas Tarantelli, director of career development at Rensselaer Polytechnic. "Many employers are holding back, waiting to see what their profits and orders will be, to see if they're able to hire." As the economy has improved, Wells Fargo Bank has increased hiring for financial analysts and entry level positions in marketing and auditing, while Deloitte, the consulting and accounting firm, has hired 5,300 college graduates, up from 4,800 last year (but down from 5,400 in 2008). "Our businesses are beginning to pick up," said Diane Borhani, Deloitte's national director of campus recruiting. "Our hiring demand is directly correlated to our business growth." As always, strong students are rising to the top. Deloitte snatched up Andrew Stern, a graduate of the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, whose academic concentration was organizational effectiveness. He said that after Lehman Brothers collapsed in September 2008, business students felt a surge of pessimism about their job prospects, but that the dark mood had lifted. "Things are looking up companies are returning to campus, and they're confidently hiring," Mr. Stern said. "The vast majority of my friends that do not have a full time job are going to graduate schools." Andrew Sum, an economics professor at Northeastern University, said the job market was awful for this year's college grads and high school grads. Many college graduates are finding jobs that do not require bachelor's degrees, like retail clerk, office assistant or barista, he said. Using federal labor statistics, he has found that only 51 percent of college graduates under age 25 were working in jobs that require college educations, down from 59 percent in 2000. "If you work in a job that doesn't require a college degree, you'll make 30 or 40 percent less," he said. "One reason a lot of high school grads are having such a hard time is you have college grads willing to take jobs that high school grads used to get." Many students who pursued degrees in what they thought were high demand fields, like nursing and teaching, have discovered that openings in those fields are not plentiful. "Two years ago, all our nurses would have multiple job offers, but today a lot of them aren't even offered an R.N. position," Mr. Sum said. "They will be offered only a health support position." While jobs might not be plentiful, advice is. Jeffrey D. Rice, career management expert at the Fisher College of Business at Ohio State University, advised job seekers to look to where federal stimulus money was being spent health care, green industries and education and to other growth areas like risk management, telecommunications and digital recordkeeping for health care. "Even in a bad economy you have to look at where pockets of opportunity are," he said. Linda Arra, director of career services at Lafayette College in Easton, Pa., said, networking was vital in today's highly competitive job market. "This generation has an independent spirit and feels they should do things on their own," she said. "But when there is a great opportunity and an employer has all these applications, you really need someone inside advocating for you." However, many graduating seniors still find themselves out of luck. Roberto McQuade, who majored in communications arts and political science at the University of Wisconsin, has applied for 20 office jobs with pharmaceutical companies and architecture and real estate concerns. Without a paycheck, he plans to move in with his parents. "My mom bought me this book it's like how to find a job when there are no jobs," he said. "It's not easy. I'm doing my best to stay optimistic." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Economy |
Bret Stephens: Gail, you sometimes write columns asking readers to vote for the worst members of the Trump administration. With that in mind, what are your candidates for the worst moments in the Trump presidency? His behavior since Joe Biden became president elect has got to be in the Top 5. What else? Gail Collins: Bret, we have to start from the very first day, when Trump obsessed about proving his inauguration crowd was bigger than Barack Obama's. Which, of course, it wasn't. But it did set a trend: the administration was going to focus on stupid things and propose phony new versions of history. Or medicine. Or any kind of reality. Bret: Alternative facts, Gail. Also known as lying. Bret: The child separation policy was definitely the administration's single most disgraceful policy. Cruel, reckless and stupid like Trump himself. I'd place that in the same basket of deplorable acts alongside the Muslim immigration ban, his accusation that Democrats want illegal immigrants "to pour into and infest our country," and his drastic reduction of the number of refugees admitted into the country. We're still only scratching the surface, Gail. What's next on your list? Gail: Gonna go with coronavirus. No idea how well a normal administration would have done in containing it, but history will remember Trump as the president who pooh poohed a pandemic. Bret: ... while suggesting that Americans inject themselves with disinfectants as a way of beating the virus. Bret: We also can't ignore the foreign policy hit parade. Exchanging "beautiful" letters with Kim Jong un. Taking Vladimir Putin at his word on the question of Russia's election interference. Strong arming the president of Ukraine to provide political dirt on the Biden family. Asking Xi Jinping's help to get re elected. Calling NATO into question. Maybe one of our clever readers can set all this to the tune of Billy Joel's "We Didn't Start the Fire." What bothers me most of all, Gail, is Trump's serial trashing of political norms, which wasn't so much a moment as it was a constant. He'll be remembered as the president who treated every civil servant as a personal servant, every cabinet secretary as a toady, every critic as an enemy, every enemy as a role model and every supporter as a fool. That's why we're nearly as freaked out about him now as we were before the election. Mark Penn and Andrew Stein write that "only a broader course correction to the center will give Democrats a fighting chance in 2022" and beyond. Tory Gavito and Adam Jentleson write that the Virgina loss should "shock Democrats into confronting the powerful role that racially coded attacks play in American politics." Ezra Klein speaks to David Shor, who discusses his fear that Democrats face electoral catastrophe unless they shift their messaging. Ross Douthat writes that the outcome of the Virginia gubernatorial race shows Democrats need a "new way to talk about progressive ideology and education." Gail: And hey, I wanted to thank you for all your reassurance about his departure. We've been hearing a lot of yelps from the Trump camp, but no effective legal challenges. You told me he was too much of a coward to fight, and you were right. Bret: Again, fingers crossed. Firing his secretary of defense was, um, disturbing, even if it was done out of pure spite. Gail: Yeah, nothing's going to protect us from a couple of months of complete craziness. Bret: I see two options. One is that Trump just decamps to Mar a Lago and basically quits being president so that he can raise money for his political action committee and start a media company to compete with Fox News. The other is some combination of weird and scary. Seeing anything in particular in your crystal ball? Gail: I wouldn't dismiss the Mar a Lago scenario. Rather than come to grips with losing he could just retreat to his safe place and avoid reality altogether. Bret: Good. He can become that guy writing irate letters to the columnists he loves to hate. Gail: Pretending nothing's happened might be better than going through nine weeks of tantrums and tirades. But I'm really freaked out by his refusal to let Biden have any briefings or even a desk in the basement. Bret: I know you weren't George W. Bush's biggest fan, but Barack Obama and his team gave the outgoing Bush administration high marks when it came to ensuring a smooth transition. It's just another way in which Trump makes all of his predecessors, with the arguable exception of James Buchanan, look good. Gail: Ah Bret, I think it's time to take another look at James Buchanan. Bret: But let's get off the subject of the current president and turn to the next one. So far, I think Biden has been conducting himself wonderfully. He's sticking to his core message of unity, seriousness, moral sobriety. I suppose he's thinking that he'll probably have a Republican Senate to deal with come January, and so he's going to have to be smart about achieving some bipartisan legislative victories. Where should he start? Gail: Well he's got to come up with a new Covid relief package. Which will have to include a heck of a lot of aid for beleaguered cities and states, unless we want to go through yet another economic collapse. Bret: That could be the first big fight with Mitch McConnell, whose attitude will be very much in the spirit of Jerry Ford's message to New York City in the days of Mayor Abe Beame: Drop dead. Gail: Yeah, we know how great McConnell was at making sure Kentucky always paid more in taxes than it got back in federal aid hahahaha. But how about you? I know you're pretty pleased right now, but when do you think we'll come to our first big parting of the ways of the Biden era? Bret: Probably when he tries to re enter the nuclear deal with Iran. Or if he names Bernie Sanders as his secretary of labor or Elizabeth Warren as secretary of the Treasury. I'm sure there will be something we already agree far too often as it is. Gail: So true. On everything from Donald Trump to good red wines. Bret: I have a good Barolo waiting for your next visit. But I have a hard time imagining that anything Biden will ever do as president will fill me with the kind of visceral loathing I feel for Trump. There's a difference between disagreement and disgust; between thinking a politician is taking the wrong route to the right destination and thinking he's taking an insane route to a horrible destination. Gail: So we're moving from mutual disgust to partisan disagreement. The whole country can start doing that: Think how happy people will be sniping with their relatives over the holidays about Medicare for All. Bret: That would be progress. I also think that a Republican Senate might prove to be a blessing in disguise for Biden. It will nip in the bud some of the Democrats' worst policy impulses, like adding seats to the Supreme Court, while giving Biden an incentive to look for policy openings where he can find some bipartisan cooperation. Gail: Well, this solves the problem of our agreeing too much. Having a Republican Senate means Biden doesn't get to do anything he ran on except not being an awful human being. Which is nice, but we deserve a little bit more. Bret: Did Biden really run on anything other than being a decent guy? I'm betting he can pick up four or five Senate Republicans for the sake of comprehensive immigration reform, which would be a massive accomplishment, or even push for a carbon tax with some kind of income tax offset. Gail: That'd be fine by me, as long as that income tax offset is for the middle class. But I am completely lacking in your confidence those rogue Republicans will take a stand on anything important. Bret: All Biden needs is a small group of moderate Republicans like Susan Collins, Mitt Romney, Lisa Murkowski and Ben Sasse. And then there's health care ... Gail: Hard for me to imagine the Republicans coming around on that one you and I can't even come around on that one. Bret: Hang on! You're not in favor of abolishing Obamacare, Medicare and Medicaid in favor of Health Savings Accounts for all? Really, Gail, I had no idea. Bret: Actually, I'm betting we'll even find some middle ground on that one. America needs a successful Biden presidency, and that means conservatives are going to have to learn the art of compromise all over again. That goes for me, too. Gail: Hey, we may not be able to host the usual Thanksgiving, but at least the holiday spirit lives on in our conversation! | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Opinion |
Summertime and the living is easy ... On Friday, Armarium, the on demand platform for luxury fashion rentals, will drop anchor in the Hamptons for a two week pop up. There will be lots of breezy bits, like a Missoni sheer lame caftan ( 300 rental, 2,190 retail) that's perfect for a summer night out. The items are also available via the mobile app, should you be vacationing elsewhere in the world. At Baron's Cove, 31 West Water Street, Sag Harbor, N.Y. The weekend promises sweet treats from two interior designers at the Surf Lodge. From Friday to Sunday, Fiona Byrne will offer a range of whimsical bags ideal for seaside holidays, like a soft clutch ( 295) with a 3D printed Life Saver charm ( 65) created in collaboration with the accessories designer Paige Gamble. On Saturday, Sasha Bikoff will offer a 20 percent discount on a selection of quirky vintage finds from around the world, including a set of four owl vases ( 320, originally 400) and a hot pink overdyed Art Deco rug ( 5,200, originally 6,500). At 183 Edgemere Street, Montauk, N.Y. From 6 to 8 p.m. on Saturday, the Vogue and Rag Bone alumnae Meredith Melling, Valerie Boster and Molly Howard will toast their new line, La Ligne, which features luxe stripy things like a silk and organza top customized with patches ( 380) at their summer pop up at Cynthia Rowley. At 696 Montauk Highway, Montauk, N.Y. Back in the city, on the last two weekends of July, Eileen Fisher will showcase a limited edition "Remade in the USA" collection in a converted greenhouse in Boerum Hill. It includes upcycled garments like a kimono cardigan felted together from two layers of cashmere sweaters ( 500) and a silk tunic reassembled from three pairs of wide leg pants ( 198). The items were dreamed up by the three Parsons graduates who were this year's recipients of the CFDA Eileen Fisher Social Innovator Award. At Glass House, 47 Bergen Street, Brooklyn. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
More than a year has passed since the Arab Spring, the catchall name for the revolutions sweeping the Middle East. The political and economic changes have closed some doors and opened others for business people willing to tolerate risk. "I have seen a flurry of activity because of the Arab Spring that was not happening before," said Naava Mashiah, an Israeli who is the chief executive of M.E. Links, a consulting company that she described as working "to nurture economic relationships between Israel and other places." Ms. Mashiah, who works out of Geneva, said much of the activity is in soft diplomacy and informal development meetings, often coordinated with human rights and nongovernmental organizations. She mentioned helping clients develop contacts in or from locations that include Tunisia, Qatar, Egypt and Libya. "It is bringing people together, even if it is a think tank," she said, adding: "A lot of networking goes on in the corridors." She described the current back channel activity and potential as akin to the 1993 Oslo Accords between Israel and the Palestinians, which touched off an economic boom. Chuck Dittrich, executive director of the U.S. Libya Business Association, said he thought that American business people needed to "just get over there and get a feel for the place," even if it did not seem immediately productive. Mr. Dittrich said that association members were meeting Libyan government officials and business people, and that they were "not so much there to sell, as more developing relationships as they do their planning process and decide where to go now." He mentioned Libyan trade shows focusing on oil, transportation and infrastructure development, health and education. Mr. Dittrich said the Libyan economy had begun to be liberalized in 2005, when Muammar el Qaddafi, then president, began courting the West. From a business perspective, he said, that means "the glass is more than half full," adding, "The ingredients are all there for them to pull this off in a very good way." American businesses that wait too long, fearing the risks, could be left behind, he said. Mr. Dittrich said his group visited in April, and "we were the first organized U.S. business organization to go to Tripoli since the conflict." But, he said, "Turkish and European delegations were there right from the early days." But a business traveler briefly stopping in the region has to make different preparations from someone who is based in a country in the midst of change. Marshall L. Stocker, a chartered financial analyst with the Boston hedge fund manager Emergent Property Advisors, moved to Cairo in June 2010, and temporarily fled after the mass protests began on Jan. 25, 2011. "In Egypt, cells were off, the Internet was off. Obviously there was no business to be done. I was barricaded in my apartment," he said, adding, "I self evacuated to the airport with tickets for three different flights" that his wife had arranged for him from the United States. Today in On Tech: Imagine not living in Big Tech's world. Dollar Tree will raise prices to 1.25 by the end of April. Mr. Stocker returned in February 2011, after Hosni Mubarak resigned as president. Despite the disruptions, he said, Egypt presents business opportunities. "Now is a great time to buy assets," he said. "Conceptually, and in practice here, assets are falling in value." He said his company was interested in Egypt because of the direction its business climate was moving. "One of the things that attracted us to Egypt was that the World Bank had improved its 'ease of doing business' rating," he said. "Egypt had become more hospitable to investment. From 2004 to 2007, it had the single greatest improvement in 'ease of doing business' of any country in the world." While things have generally settled, he said he was prepared for emergencies. "As a result of the Arab Spring, I bought political evacuation insurance, and I have a satellite phone," he said. He uses Global Rescue, a company that provides medical evacuation, security services and other emergency assistance. Still, Mr. Stocker said some Cairo business travel costs had decreased, including hotel rates and airfares. The Arab Spring also affected regional flight patterns, particularly between Egypt and Israel, where near daily direct flights once connected Tel Aviv and Cairo. The Israeli airline El Al now flies once a month, and the Egyptian carrier Air Sinai often cancels scheduled flights. Ms. Mashiah suggested using neutral Jordan as an alternative meeting or connection point for these and other Middle East countries. She also recommended using Europe for initial meetings between American and Middle Eastern business people, avoiding visa issues and other risks. With no direct flight connections between the United States and Libya, Mr. Dittrich said his group used varied hubs, including Frankfurt, Rome and Istanbul, to reach Tripoli. Once there, he said, internal connections on Libya's Buraq Air were in "new Boeing planes, right on time and cheap." There are now fewer direct connections between the United States and Egypt, Mr. Stocker said. He now flies through Amsterdam or Paris, lamenting the connection time. Egyptair has direct flights from Kennedy Airport in New York to Cairo. The Arab countries are not the only region of the world undergoing transformation. John McAuliff, executive director of the Fund for Reconciliation and Development, which works to normalize relations between the United States and Cuba, said certain sectors of Cuba's economy were open to Americans, despite Treasury Department restrictions. "Agriculture is allowed. Ag people can do this, can go for the purpose of discussing sales," with Cubans, he said, adding that "telecommunications is allowed." Myanmar, formerly known as Burma, also recently liberalized its economy, though there are few Western business travelers. Marilyn Downing Staff, president of Asia Transpacific Journeys, said she had mostly seen travelers from aid groups like CARE, World Vision and Doctors Without Borders. Asian business travelers have long made inroads, she said, from Chinese oil industry representatives to sales teams from Korean and Indian car, soap, clothing and refrigerator companies. "All bets are off with the embargo lifting," she said. "Things are changing as we speak." The problem, she said is "the business traveler is going to struggle to get appropriate accommodations. The infrastructure is maxed out," with few hotels at international business standards. Still, those with experience in troubled or developing regions will discount such concerns. Ms. Mashiah, the Israeli consultant, said, "If you are afraid of turbulent times, this is not right for you." But, she added, "the more risk, the more opportunity." "There is a risk for business people who wait five years, but some come in right on the ground, like in Iraq," she said. "And they are reaping the profits." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Global Business |
After Kim Velsey, a lifelong runner, suffered a hamstring injury a year ago, she decided to take the opportunity to start visiting the boutique gyms that were proliferating around her apartment in the Clinton Hill section of Brooklyn. "Maybe this is going to be the new way," she thought. But Ms. Velsey's fantasy of swanning from Pilates to trampoline to boot camp studio did not last long. When she showed up for one of her first sessions, a barre class, she settled into a spot next to a woman who told her that there was not enough space, and banished her to a spot across the room. "It was in a corner, and we were doing all these bends, and I had to squeeze my body into an awkward angle, otherwise I would be hitting my neighbor's butt with my butt," said Ms. Velsey, 33, a freelance writer whose work appears in The New York Times and elsewhere. "It was really stressful." The amenities weren't that impressive, either. "You're paying 32 and they don't even have a shower just dry shampoo and wet wipes?" She has since started swimming laps at a Parks Department pool. To go by the rise of ClassPass and the army of lissome "fitfluencers" on Instagram, one might assume this is an era of peak boutique fitness. "Athleisure" now enjoys Merriam Webster status, and celebrity gawkers know where their favorite Jenner sister trains. Smaller gyms are the fastest growing segment of the exercise business, with membership growth of 6.3 percent (double the industry average) from 2015 to 2016, according to the International Health, Racquet Sportsclub Association. "If you go to a class and you feel like you're not working very hard or it seems too easy, it probably is," said Roger Fielding, senior scientist and director of the nutrition, exercise physiology and sarcopenia laboratory at the U.S.D.A. Research Center on Aging at Tufts University in Boston. "There might be benefits of relaxing and getting centered, but in terms of the physical component, many classes probably involve less intensity than activities that raise your heart rate, like playing basketball or running." Those classic activities also tend to be cheaper. A spot at many of the miniature gyms of the moment, such as the P.Volve or SoulCycle's tiny new Annex, can cost close to 40. Even ClassPass, the supposed bargain warehouse of group fitness, no longer offers New Yorkers an unlimited plan. In these hyper wired times with Twitter feeds and cable news bubbling over with outrage and anger, the impulse to engage in an activity that feels plucked from an analog era makes sense. Many of the gyms that cater to fashion models and investment bankers can feel like bastions of blowouts and entitlement, while public parks and recreation centers still welcome urban dwellers across every imaginable spectrum. The sense of democracy and sweating with strangers from different backgrounds rather than folks we know from college or the school run is a considerable draw at a time of heightened income disparity. On a Sunday afternoon not long ago, a dozen young women filtered into a gym in a public school close to the Essex Street Market on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. They'd shown up for one of the most rigorous workouts going, a weekly pickup game called Downtown Girls Basketball. After a lightning round of running drills, the assembled artists, designers and students got down to 55 minutes of uninterrupted, cheeks ablaze cardio. As the group skipped, zigzagged and squeaked around the court, Aria McManus held back on the sidelines. Ms. McManus, 28, an art director and artist who organizes the group, was keeping the participants' morale aloft (as well as documenting the moment for Instagram). "Hustle it!" she said. "All the way, all the way! So close!" She has a mailing list of more than 300. "Childlike fun is so rare these days," Ms. McManus said. "If you take winning out of the equation, it becomes so silly. If you stop and think about sports and ask, 'What are we doing?,' it's like, 'O.K., I'm running and I'm tripping and I'm really trying to make a basket.' It's very strange, which I love. And we get sweaty, a bonus." Farther west, fashion world denizens flock every other Thursday night to a fifth floor, loft like Chambers Street dance studio for Moves, a free spirited dance class. It is run by Marisa Competello, whose floral design studio Meta Flora fills the designer Rachel Comey's shop with off kilter flower arrangements, and Lauren Gerrie, Marc Jacobs's personal chef and a founder of the BigLittle Get Together catering company. The main qualification is that they've both enjoyed dancing since childhood. "It's funny, I just tried one of those boxing classes and realized there's a real recipe to boutique fitness," Ms. Competello said. "They're dark and the music is superloud and someone is yelling at you over a microphone." Tapping into childhood joy is also a prime motivator for Dani Seitz, 27, a Canadian model who runs Lady Ballerz, a skills oriented spinoff of Downtown Girls Basketball. Ms. Seitz's mother was a basketball coach and she played the sport all the way through high school, until she began modeling and agents warned her not to keep playing because she might bruise. (Her current agency, Muse Models, does not share this view.) She organizes monthly basketball conventions in a SoHo gym where female attendees practice the fundamentals of the game under the tutelage of a coach from the Parks Department. In October, Ms. Seitz started a YouTube channel, with videos showing her practicing basics on outdoor basketball courts, dressed in what she calls "old school phys ed fashion" white socks hiked high, short shorts hiked even higher. The retro visuals call to mind 1980s French movies about teenagers, with a soupcon of vintage Jane Fonda. "My videographer and I were inspired by the Wes Anderson vibe," Ms. Seitz said. "We love his quirkiness. I'm all about that." Let us not forget the original gangster of unfussy fitness: the Y.M.C.A. The actor Ethan Hawke is a regular at the Y on Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn; so strong is his passion for it that he has lent his star power to an Instagram campaign, SelfieWithSomebodyNew, to promote the athletic center. "It's really important for young people and for older people to cross pollinate," Mr. Hawke recently told People Magazine. We are living in a world, he said, where "there's just so much division everywhere that one of the things the Y can do right now is raise their hands and say, 'Hey, everybody's welcome here.'" Laurie Buck, a 50 something television producer and former habitue of "cliquey" yoga studios, now routinely treks from her home in the Prospect Lefferts Gardens neighborhood of Brooklyn to the Chinatown Y.M.C.A. Ms. Buck encounters exercisers of nearly every ethnicity and age group, she said, along with a smattering of "man buns and hipster freelance girls." After her swims, Ms. Buck likes to sit in the sauna with a crew of women several decades older than her who offer her lessons in Cantonese. "I learned how to say 'hello' and 'goodbye' and 'my back hurts' and 'my knee is swollen,'" she said with a laugh. "They make me excited to get older." Then there is the slightly tonier network of old school university and racket clubs in Midtown Manhattan. Dave Barry, a 37 year old director of capital advisory at a financial firm, calls the prices of the boutique classes several female acquaintances have dragged him to "laughable." Yet he ponies up over 3,000 annually for a membership to the New York Athletic Club, where he and a group of friends regularly meet to play squash. "The club tries to support Olympians from some of the fringier sports, like fencing and judo, and you get a ton of N.B.A. players training there," Mr. Barry said. "You can be lifting weights between a 75 year old and an Olympic medalist in fencing, and Carmelo Anthony will be on the basketball court shooting hoops. It's very old school, and that's cool." Ms. Seitz finds old school so cool that she hopes eventually to open a rec center of her own. "They'll wear pinnies and play tag and dodge ball and race across the monkey bars," she said of her fantasy patrons. "They'll feel happy, and walk away smiling." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
How (and Why) to Use Native Plants In recent years, the demand for pollinator plants has surged. But most of us don't have room for a meadow. So where do these native plants fit in your garden, which may not be that big and is probably not very wild looking? And how do you find plants that are native to your particular location, with the highest value to beneficial insects and, in turn, birds and other native wildlife? One of the first places I saw native plants being cultivated was outside Wilmington, Del., around 1992, at Mt. Cuba Center, a former du Pont family estate that is now a native focused public garden, with more than 50 acres of display gardens on over 1,000 acres of natural land. It is also a research facility, where large scale trials are conducted on selected varieties of native annuals, perennials and even shrubs, testing for garden worthiness, disease resistance and appeal to the insects who have evolved alongside the plants. Get Oriented the Way a Plant Does Although a nursery tag may say "native," the species could hail from a completely different sort of area. That's because plants don't observe state boundaries, but rather habitats within regional zones, like coastal plains or forests with particular soils, light and moisture conditions. State native plant societies or organizations like Mt. Cuba can guide gardeners to solid local reference sources, Mr. Coombs said, including ZIP code based plant databases from the National Audubon Society, the National Wildlife Federation and others. Decide What You Want to Accomplish Any native planting can help at least in a small way to bridge the gaps in our fragmented, overdeveloped habitat. But what should you emphasize? "Think about what kind of wildlife you want to attract," said Mr. Coombs, who has seen up close the appeal of Monarda to butterflies and hummingbirds, and how Baptisia is "a great early season food source for bumblebees." A water garden that remains unfrozen year round attracts birds, dragonflies and more. Focus on Welcoming Insects, Rather Than Pretty Plants Butterfly and moth caterpillars are essential components of food webs that sustain other native creatures, specifically songbirds, many of whom feed the insects to their young. "Grow bugs" is a kind of mantra for habitat style gardeners, which means using no insecticides or other chemicals. But Where to Make Room? In many residential settings, shrinking the lawn which doesn't offer pollen, nectar or seed, because we mow it is a prime opportunity. I have what I like to think of as "unmown" islands within my garden, creating small meadows of whatever came up (little bluestem grass and goldenrod, mostly), which I then edited. I've transformed other grassy areas into planting beds for native trees, shrubs and perennials. You could also rethink a grass strip along the property line, inside a fence or hedge, that you may currently mow right up to, or that may be planted with nonnative ivy, pachysandra or vinca. Even a six foot wide swath transitioned to native ground cover and fruit bearing shrubs enhances diversity. In one spot, long planted with summer garden annuals, the shift to native perennials included plants like Phlox Forever Pink and Echinacea tennesseensis. Mt. Cuba's pots are swapped out three times each season with a mix of perennials and shrubs. In spring, a deciduous native azalea in a large container might be surrounded with woodland phlox (Phlox divaricata), purple leaved heuchera and fringed bleeding heart (Dicentra eximia). "Last fall, we did pots of Muhlenbergia grass that were stunning," Mr. Coombs said. Best of all, the plants can be overwintered in the vegetable garden and used again, or incorporated into the garden. Plant in Layers, the Way Nature Does One such opportunity: Enlarge those diversity lacking mulch circles beneath trees in a lawn, making room for native woodland shrubs as the middle layer, then herbaceous perennials beneath. "No bare soil," Mr. Coombs advised. "And your 'ground cover' can be three feet tall that's fine." Even better: Call ahead with a wish list based on research. "Talk to your garden center about plants you hope to grow and why," Mr. Coombs said. "In a roundabout way, the more they hear from customers, the more they will stock natives." "A hummingbird plant is very different looking than a butterfly plant," Mr. Coombs said, noting that even within a single genus, the size and shape of the flower parts can vary enough to appeal to an entirely different clientele. "In our Coreopsis trials, the species' different morphological characteristics predicted what type of bee would prefer it this bee's tongue would match it, where another's cannot." To figure out which plants pollinators are frequenting, researchers from the University of Delaware, led by Douglas W. Tallamy, have been conducting scientific pollinator studies in the Mt. Cuba trial garden. In a large trial of Phlox paniculata, tall garden phlox, small turned out to be better. "The variety called Jeana was the one attracting the most butterflies," Mr. Coombs said. "But we're not really quite sure what characteristics were bringing the butterflies in. Its flowers are actually the smallest out of any garden phlox, somewhere between a pea and a dime." Maybe most dramatic: Leaf color changes made in a cultivar from green to purple or red can be unpalatable to insects that rely on the plant. Red and blue pigments, called anthocyanins, don't taste as good as chlorophyll. Don't clean up too obsessively or too soon, especially in the spring and fall, as beneficial creatures need leaf litter and other hiding places to overwinter and reproduce. "We prolong our cutbacks till later winter or early spring one of the last things we do," Mr. Coombs said. And as a compromise between horticulture and ecology, "you can even mulch in place," he said. "Cut four foot stems into pieces and let them lie rather than carrying them away to the compost." Even for the Pros, It's an Experiment "I always tell people that it's OK to fail," Mr. Coombs said. "Don't worry, trial and error is how we create a lot of our gardens at Mt. Cuba. Yes, we may have had a design in mind, but sometimes the garden has its own idea what will grow there and not. You will have to take direction from Mother Nature." Focus on which beneficial insects or birds you want to attract, and learn more about the plants they favor in your area. Making room for natives in the residential landscape usually means shrinking the lawn. Beds of natives should be planted in layers tall, medium, shorter the way nature plants them. Adding water that's unfrozen year round to your landscape and being a little messy leaving leaf litter in place as long as possible are other tactics for increasing diversity. For weekly email updates on residential real estate news, sign up here. Follow us on Twitter: nytrealestate. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
Shops opened on the street frontages. The second floor had offices; the third, studios with 18 foot high ceilings. A carriageway ran from 46th to 47th Streets with covered passages on the courtyard to protect carriage passengers from the rain. The courtyard had a central conservatory. A writer for The New York Times noted the low state of many European arcades, and ventured that Gerry's might possibly remain a high toned affair, as long as "certain classes of shops" and "criminals and semi criminal classes" were kept away. Lighted by hundreds of electric bulbs at night, the Windsor Arcade was impossible to miss, nestled as it was in the brownstone suffocation of Fifth Avenue. The New York Press called it "cheap" but The New York Tribune said it was considered "the most beautiful 'taxpayer' ever erected in this city," using the term for a small, temporary structure built just to pay the carrying costs. The Times was simply happy that the "dreary void" would no longer keep reminding New Yorkers "of the distressing scenes enacted before their eyes." The tone was indeed high in the Windsor Arcade, which housed a saddlery, the Pach Brothers photography studio, Steinway Sons and the hatter Dunlap Company, with its rooms of quartered oak and velvet rugs. The decorator Ogden Codman made one of the studios his headquarters for a decade. Another tenant was the florist Henry Augustus Siebrecht, who leased the conservatory in the courtyard. The Windsor Arcade was torn down by halves in the 1910s and 1920s for buildings which themselves have been replaced by towers. Although the Windsor Hotel fire was hardly comparable in magnitude to the World Trade Center tragedy, which was followed by years of often acrimonious contests over the fate of the remains, the missing and the character of the succeeding structures, the lack of any kind of commemoration of the fire seems strange. But while other disasters of the period, including the Brooklyn Theater fire of 1876, which took at least 300 lives, and the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire of 1911, in which 146 died, are memorialized, still others fell through the cracks. Gerry's Beaux Arts structure was without plaques, viewing plaza, list of victims, funerary connotations or somber design. There is a photograph at the Museum of the City of New York taken in May 1903, looking from an adjacent building into the arcade courtyard. Directly in the middle is a tall columnar object at the rear wall, described in the caption as a monument to the Windsor Hotel dead. It was not; it was a chimney for the heating and electric plant of the arcade, placed, according to The Times, at "the furthest possible distance the land allows." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
Millie Small, the Jamaican singer whose 1964 hit, "My Boy Lollipop," introduced the upbeat rhythms of ska to international audiences, died on Tuesday in London. She was 73. Her death was announced by Chris Blackwell, the founder of Island Records and the song's producer. The announcement did not specify the cause, but Mr. Blackwell told The Jamaica Observer that Ms. Small had suffered a stroke. Although "My Boy Lollipop" was Ms. Small's only major hit, reaching No. 2 on both the American and British charts, it was a significant one. It was a turning point in Jamaican music that brought the island's signature sound to a wider audience, opening the door for artists, like Bob Marley, who would popularize ska's rhythmic successor, reggae. "My Boy Lollipop" was the first big success for Mr. Blackwell, whose Island label would go on to release music by Marley, Toots and the Maytals, Roxy Music, U2 and others. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
As district attorneys in New York State, we support efforts to make our criminal justice system fairer. Fairness and public safety are not in conflict. When people trust the criminal justice system to treat everyone equitably, we are all safer. We support the New York State Legislature's efforts to address the inequities of bail and to ensure that people accused of crimes have the information they need to defend themselves in court. We also appreciate the willingness of state lawmakers to collaborate with us to refine the reforms passed last year in a manner that best serves our entire communities. Though we are just seven of 62 district attorneys in the state, we represent more than half of the population. And we uniquely see how bail and discovery laws before and after the reforms affect our diverse constituencies. The reforms, which took effect on Jan. 1, eliminated cash bail for most misdemeanors and nonviolent felonies, but continued to prohibit judges from holding defendants before trial if the judge considered them a danger to the community. Another reform requires prosecutors to turn over to defendants all information concerning their case under strict deadlines. The old law allowed prosecutors to withhold key evidence until the morning of trial, though many of our offices provided it much earlier in the process. We believe bail reform was necessary. No one should be held in custody awaiting trial simply because of an inability to pay bail when others accused of the same crime and with similar histories are freed. Dangerous individuals accused of serious crimes should not be able to buy their way out of jail. But we don't think the current bail reforms went far enough. Cash bail should be eliminated for all offenses, with judges given the discretion to detain the small number of individuals whose behavior poses a threat to public safety or who have demonstrated that they are unwilling to show up in court in serious cases. To take the next steps in reforming our bail system, New York should look to the successes of the reforms that took effect in New Jersey in 2017. New Jersey substantially eliminated cash bail. The state now requires judges to conduct an individualized assessment of each person charged with a crime using a data backed risk assessment algorithm that weighs the current charges, criminal history and other factors to inform their decision to hold or release someone awaiting trial. Judges in New Jersey are permitted to consider both a defendant's flight risk and whether the defendant poses a significant danger. This assessment process, combined with robust and fully funded pretrial services, has helped New Jersey reduce its jail population by more than 40 percent and decrease racial disparities in its jails. At the same time, violent crime has continued to decline, and the state has not seen a significant increase in recidivism or missed court appearances. With the exception of New York, every state, the District of Columbia and the federal government allow judges to exercise discretion with an eye toward protecting the public when deciding to hold someone before trial. New York should take this common sense approach, making sure to provide safeguards against bias and abuse by maintaining a presumption in favor of release in all but the most serious offenses. To further guard against bias, New York should require a detention hearing where the prosecutor must prove by clear and convincing evidence that a person poses a danger or a flight risk and allow for prompt appellate review. Some advocates oppose the use of risk assessment tools, believing they rely on factors that "bake in" racial bias. But assessment tools can be designed to minimize racial bias. Factors that correlate with race can be de emphasized in favor of those that are predictive but not as heavily correlated with race. With an assessment tool, the factors relied on are explicit and can be accounted for and addressed by the accused person, as opposed to the bias that may live in the mind of even the most well meaning judge relying exclusively on his or her own experience without the benefit of such a tool. New York's assessment tool should likewise be clear, reviewable and studied annually so that it similarly guards against racial bias. As with bail, reforms to New York's discovery laws were long overdue. We agree with the Legislature that individuals charged with a crime should have access to vital evidence against them to defend themselves. But we strongly believe that more flexibility is needed in the discovery process. The new law requires the disclosure of every single item of information in every case without regard to the seriousness of the case or the relevance of the information, or whether the case is going to trial, within 15 days. This mandate has placed insurmountable burdens on the criminal justice system. Our assistant district attorneys now find themselves spending all of their time tracking down tangential information that may never be used in court. This has begun to result in important cases being dismissed because we are unable to produce every single piece of information within the rigid time frame set by the new law. Based on our analysis, no other state in the country requires prosecutors to turn over this volume of information, in so short a time, and none ties discovery deadlines to the prosecution's declaration that it is ready to proceed, which is required under the state's speedy trial rule. This can threaten prosecutions, because the speedy trial rule sets time limits for when criminal cases must be ready for trial or be dismissed. We propose several reasonable and sensible adjustments to the law that will meet the important goals of the reform that no one is forced to take a plea simply to get out of jail, or face a trial or plea decision without the relevant information about the charges. They will also relieve the burden that the new law has placed on our ability to do justice in individual cases. We propose that shorter disclosure timelines apply to individuals who are jailed before trial. For defendants who are not in jail, we propose longer deadlines for the provision of the information. Additionally, we propose that the Legislature revisit the items of discovery that the new law requires prosecutors to turn over, prioritizing information to be used at trial and applying a relevance test to other discovery requirements, subject to a judge's approval when challenged by the defense. Again, looking to other states would be instructive no other state requires anything close to the amount of discovery New York's law now does. Prosecutors should be able to state that they are ready for trial and to stop the clock on rules that require cases to be ready in a specified time period when theyhave turned over everything they intend to use at a trial. The new law prevents prosecutors from being considered ready for trial unless they have turned over every single piece of information, no matter how peripheral to their case. We also believe more needs to be done to protect victims and fearful witnesses. We have noted an increased reluctance of victims and witnesses to come forward and participate in the prosecution of crime since we began having to tell them that their contact information would be provided to the defense within the first two weeks of a case. We believe that this required disclosure so early in each and every case, regardless of whether it is likely to be resolved without trial constitutes an unwarranted invasion of privacy, threatens the safety of those named and reduces their willingness to come forward. Changes are needed to protect the safety and privacy of victims and witnesses, while still allowing defendants to seek early disclosure of information about victims or witnesses if a case is going to trial and the facts require it. As district attorneys, we embrace reforms to the criminal justice system that advance our goals of reducing incarceration and protecting public safety. We support efforts to make our criminal justice system fairer and more equitable. And we appreciate the Legislature's willingness to work with us to make adjustments to the new laws so that they protect the rights and the safety of all New Yorkers. Darcel D. Clark is the district attorney from the Bronx; Eric Gonzalez, from Brooklyn; Melinda Katz, from Queens; Michael E. McMahon, from Staten Island; Anthony A. Scarpino Jr., from Westchester County; Madeline Singas, from Nassau County; and Cyrus R. Vance Jr. from Manhattan. The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We'd like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here's our email: letters nytimes.com. Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter ( NYTopinion) and Instagram. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Opinion |
Philip J. Hanlon, the provost of the University of Michigan, will be the next president of Dartmouth College, starting in July. Dr. Hanlon, 57, a mathematician whose work focuses on probability and combinatorics, will take office on July 1, succeeding Jim Yong Kim, who resigned in April to become the president of the World Bank. The interim president, Carol L. Folt, will resume her role as provost when Dr. Hanlon arrives. "I'm thrilled to be the 18th president of Dartmouth," said Dr. Hanlon, who graduated from Dartmouth in 1977. "I'm particularly excited to be leading Dartmouth in a period when I believe higher education is going to change in important ways." Information technology, he said, has already "significantly changed everything about the way we live our lives," and he said he expected that it would be increasingly used to take "moments of passive engagement" like listening to lectures and "flip" them, so students spend that time on their own, and reserve class time for interacting with the professor and classmates. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Education |
It's a big week for Sierra. Played by Emily Browning, this new agey daughter of Hollywood royalty and the mother of a son with Helen's dead partner, Vik joined the slim ranks of non core characters who have gotten their own point of view segments. In that segment, she lands the title role in a hot director's adaptation of "Madame Bovary." (She lands the director, too.) She receives a visit from her movie star mom. And she nearly kills herself and her infant son in a coked up car crash. As one might expect, these events are not unrelated. Jennifer Jason Leigh guest stars as Adeline, Sierra's mostly neglectful, very famous mother. Fresh from a jaunt to Nepal, she shows up expecting to easily reinsert herself back into Sierra's life, whether by babysitting her new grandson (whose age she doesn't know) or by "helping" Sierra rehearse a scene. As hard as it is for Sierra to endure Adeline's narcissism, it's even harder to fight against it. Faced with the slightest pushback Sierra very mildly shades her mom for dragging her from set to set as a child until her father stepped in and made sure she attended school Adeline withdraws completely and pointedly, reneging on her babysitting commitment as a passive aggressive punishment. It's rare for "The Affair" to dump a full fledged heel like Adeline on its audience, and for good reason. The show's characters have always thrived on nuance, contrast, even contradiction characteristics that render clear cut heroes and villains obsolete. That's what makes Adeline a misfire, even in the hands of an actor as gifted as Leigh. Debuting as she does in Sierra's first P.O.V. segment, before we've had a chance to see much of the world through her daughter's eyes, she comes across as a grinning, oblivious monster. She's a one note character, and that one note nearly drowns out this entire section of the episode. Fortunately, Sierra's catastrophic late night escapades right the ship. After leaving her baby in the care of Stacey, the Solloways' 12 year old daughter hey, it's better than just locking him in her car alone, as she did during her audition Sierra nearly blows her new gig until she runs the scene the way she wanted to before her mother butted in. Out dancing with the cast and crew later that night, she gets an earful from her director about the crush he used to have on her mom. But Sierra, he promises, is much prettier and more talented. A few lines of cocaine later and they're having sex in a bathroom stall, the same kind of impulsive decision that bound her life to Vik's and Helen's forever. Sierra returns home to get chewed out by Helen, who scolds her for letting the 12 year old Stacey (Abigail Dylan Harrison) take care of her baby. Desperate, Sierra takes her crying son out for an intoxicated ride around the neighborhood to soothe him ... and ends up plowing into a dumpster at a high speed. She is briefly knocked out, and when she comes to, the silence of her baby is deafening. It takes an endless minute for her extricate herself from the damaged vehicle to check on him, and the tension until we discover he is perfectly fine is stomach churning. Add this wildly self destructive behavior to her self injurious habits of banging her head against the wall and calling herself names when she screws up and ... well, this is unpleasant, powerful stuff that speaks to the hopeless, trapped feeling that can torment new parents, particularly new single mothers. Helen has an easier go of things, but only because the bar is so low. The through line for her segment is need, and the question of whether or when it is appropriate to ask people for things they may not want to give. Noah, in his characteristically oblivious way, tells her he wants her back. Vik's mother, Priya (Zenobia Shroff), wants her to play the grieving widow and pretend to be the mother of Vik and Sierra's baby in order to avoid offending her traditionalist brother, who is unexpectedly in town. Sasha coaches her in the art of saying no, but as the episode progresses it seems he may be too masterful a practitioner. He cuts the daughter of his late fiancee an extortion check rather than let her back into his life, although to be fair it seems the check is what she's really after. He blows off a commitment to a struggling, veteran director in order to take on another blockbuster sequel. Afterward, he tells Helen she only got a gig decorating the director's home as a favor to him. Other than the car accident, the episode's most grueling moment comes when Helen stands and watches as the director's wife, Carolina (the marvelous Jessica Hecht), all but begs Sasha to stay with her husband's movie, the success of which stands to pull him out of a yearslong depression. The giving, caring man Helen thought she knew vanishes in a nauseating haze of I'm terribly sorrys and it's simply not possibles, and the experience of watching the man she loves unfeelingly preside over her new friend's humiliation is mortifying. Perhaps that's why the parting shot fired by Priya after Helen returns home from the director's party finds its mark. Priya has never been friendly to Helen, but in hearing the older woman's story how her brother and parents cut her off decades ago because she married a Muslim, and how her brother's fluke arrival in Los Angeles and desire to see his nephew's widow and their baby offered a chance for reconciliation Helen realizes that Priya, too, has her own hurts, her own needs. It's true that Helen can't reasonably be held accountable for Vik's infidelity, or for not knowing Priya's life story without having been told. But Sierra's and Priya's pain is just as real as Helen's, and their needs just as pressing. Can't wielding the power to say no be as hurtful as it is healing? None No Joanie segment this episode. No opening title sequence either. I'm starting to wonder how much the show will play with its format before it reaches its finale. None Maura Tierney is such an M.V.P. as Helen it almost goes without saying, but occasionally she delivers line readings that are so thoughtful and piercing they deserve special mention. Her response to Noah's attempt to get back together is one of those: "I don't love you anymore. I don't want your love. It terrifies me, and it's caused me nothing but pain, so I'm done." You can feel the last vestiges of her feelings for this man exit her body as if she were spitting them out. None Browning turns in series best work here as well. Because we've previously seen Sierra only as a rich hippie flibbertigibbet or an extremely pregnant mom to be, her anguish as a terrified young mother is a revelation. None The scene from "Bovary" that Sierra knocks out of the park? Rejecting her child as too exhausting and ugly to deal with. I suspect some of her conduct later that night was self medication to help forget how easily this came to her. None Note how taken aback Helen is when she hears Noah's former publicist (Brooke Lyons) bad mouth him at the director's party: It's less because she feels protective and more because she thought they'd been sleeping together. (She's wrong: They almost did, but then Noah accidentally almost hit on his own daughter in a hot tub and ran off. Ah, "The Affair.") None Is there any sound more punishing to the soul than hearing a baby cry and not being able to do anything about it? | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
A dozen plastic topped tables offer room for about 40 patrons. Customers line up outside at lunchtime, waiting to consume spicy noodle soup, dumplings and iced soy milk amid the clatter of plastic bowls and chopsticks. In April, however, the little restaurant, in the heart of Causeway Bay, one of Hong Kong's busiest shopping districts, nearly had to shut down after the landlord tripled the already expensive rent. "We were paying around 200,000 dollars a month," said Au Kei hong, the shop's manager, referring to an amount in Hong Kong dollars equivalent to about 25,800. "But the landlord then increased it to 600,000. It was too expensive. We cannot afford that." Others have not been so lucky. Soaring rents have forced at least three small businesses on the same Causeway Bay street to move or close in the last few months, and similar tales of woe are common among small businesses in other prime areas in the bustling, crowded city. Rapid growth and sweeping economic changes have raised retail rents in many of Asia's growing metropolises in recent years. But nowhere have they reached the heights of Hong Kong, a banking, logistics and trading hub that many companies see as a testing ground and launching pad for the vastly larger mainland Chinese market. Hong Kong's residential property prices have fallen from their recent highs mainly because of government measures intended to cool demand but those measures do not affect retail rents. "It's a normal phenomenon for small retailers to be squeezed out by high rents. It happens everywhere," said Joe Lin, executive director of retail services at the real estate services firm CBRE in Hong Kong. "But in Hong Kong, the pressures have become very severe in the last two to three years it's very unhealthy. Luxury and jewelry now dominate 90 percent of the space in prime locations," Mr. Lin said. "The whole trade mix in some of these areas has changed." Causeway Bay, where Nam Kee Noodles is struggling to survive among high end clothing and watch retailers, commands the most expensive retail rents in the world: an average of 1,950 Hong Kong dollars, or 251, per square foot per month, according to figures for the first quarter of 2013 from Cushman Wakefield, a real estate consulting firm. Two other Hong Kong neighborhoods, Tsim Sha Tsui and Central, also rank among the five most expensive locations in the world with Fifth Avenue and Times Square in New York easily topping luxury shopping destinations like the Champs Elysees in Paris and the Ginza in Tokyo. That has squeezed out many of the colorful mom and pop stores hardware shops, fruit stalls, herbal medicine vendors, restaurants that form a large part of Hong Kong's business ecosystem, changing the face of many neighborhoods in the process. The restaurant's owner, Mak Ping kuen, says he hopes to reopen in another part of town but has struggled to find a site. Open or closed on Thanksgiving? Here are stores' plans for Thursday and Friday. The high cost of gas is forcing families to cut back on activities and essentials. Clearview AI does well in another round of facial recognition accuracy tests. "I hope we can reopen as soon as possible. My customers are getting impatient," he said. Nearby, two popular bars in the SoHo district have closed in the last few months, again because the owners could not afford big rent increases. And Tsui Yuen Desserts, which sold delicacies like ginger flavored milk custard and sweet black sesame soup for less than 20 dollars a bowl (about 2.50), had to relocate from Causeway Bay to Wan Chai, a neighborhood more geared to night life than to hungry tourists. "Sure, we have some old customers who still come for a bowl of dessert, but it's a lot quieter now," said the manager, Mr. Ho, who would give only his last name. "We want to go back to Causeway Bay, but we can't. Even a small little shop would cost us 200,000 dollars a month. Going back would bankrupt us." In the wake of the displaced businesses, luxury goods retailers and jewelry and cosmetics shops have flocked en masse to Hong Kong in recent years, seeking to cater to a flood of shoppers from neighboring mainland China. The British clothing retailer Topshop, for example, opened a large store in Central its first in greater China in early June, while Apple and the Japanese clothing retailer Uniqlo opened huge outlets around the corner from Nam Kee Noodles in the last few months. Taxes on high end goods are far lower in Hong Kong than in mainland China, so those goods in particular are popular with mainland shoppers. At the same time, the number of visitors from the mainland has soared since travel restrictions for them were loosened in 2003 to help Hong Kong weather the economic blow dealt by an outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome, or SARS, that year. In 2002, 6.8 million mainlanders visited Hong Kong. Last year, the number was 35 million. And as long as they do, Mr. Lin of CBRE said, retailers will want to increase their presence in the city, ensuring that shop rents will stay high. Mr. Ho of Tsui Yuen Desserts said: "Ten or 20 percent increases over the years were reasonable. But a 100 percent increase we can't pay that. How many bowls would we have to sell just to cover the rent?" | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Global Business |
CLEVELAND Just before the Republican National Convention begins, this city is making good this week on its longtime plan to renovate a 10 acre public green space, following a trend in major American cities to link park construction with economic redevelopment goals. On Thursday, Cleveland will reopen Public Square after a 50 million, 15 month renovation. More than eight years in planning, the restoration of Public Square turns it into a place that is again green enough for its original 18th century purpose as a pasture for sheep and cattle. It has also helped unleash a strong surge in residential and commercial construction in center city Cleveland. The city, on the shore of Lake Erie and the state's second largest by population, has been basking in a spotlight this year as residents savor the long awaited championship of their National Basketball Association team, the Cavaliers, led by LeBron James, who grew up in nearby Akron. Now they are preparing for more attention as the Republican convention comes to the city in mid July. Public Square, where Ontario Street had met Superior Avenue in a black basin of asphalt, has been completely redesigned by James Corner and his colleagues at Field Operations, the same firm that created the High Line elevated park in New York City. The improvements echo projects in places like New York, Washington and Chicago, where public green spaces have been incorporated with economic development plans. Boston, in one example, replaced a downtown freeway with the Rose Kennedy Greenway, a 1.5 mile linear park and promenade with landscaped gardens. Last year, Cleveland issued construction permits for projects valued at 1.5 billion, much of it in the city center, said Edward W. Rybka, the city's chief of regional development. That is twice the value of projects permitted in 2012. In all, 29 projects with more than 3.5 billion in investment have opened or are scheduled to open in the city center from 2016 to 2018, according to the Downtown Cleveland Alliance, a civic economic development group. The projects are adding 1,500 hotel rooms, converting 1 million square feet of commercial space into about 3,300 residential units and adding 350,000 square feet of office space. Cleveland is emerging as one of the country's principal centers of biomedical innovation and development, centered on the Cleveland Clinic and Case Western Reserve University. The city counts 25,000 jobs and 700 companies 400 more than a decade ago that are involved in health and medical research, biomedical device design, information technology and other related activities. "From a biomedical standpoint, there is so much talent moving to Cleveland," said Aram Nerpouni, the chief executive of BioEnterprise, the sector's nonprofit development group. "We just want to keep that rolling." The ceiling of Heinen's Fine Foods in downtown Cleveland. Michael F. McElroy for The New York Times As the changes come, the city's three term Democratic mayor, Frank G. Jackson, is contending with deep differences inside and outside Cleveland about how to link the economic opportunities in the prospering downtown with the city's poor neighborhoods. Cleveland's nearly 37 percent poverty rate is one of the highest of any major American city, according to the census. In an interview, Mr. Jackson expressed dismay at a new state labor law, signed on May 30 by the Republican governor, John Kasich, that nullifies a 12 year city ordinance directing contractors working on most city projects to hire Cleveland residents for 20 percent of their labor force. The Ohio Contractors Association and the Republican controlled legislature asserted that such local quotas, which also were in effect in Akron, made it harder for contractors to hire the best people. The provision, according to figures from Cleveland, generated 4,200 jobs from 2011 to 2015, almost all of them minority workers. "That local labor provision helped people get jobs in this city," said Mr. Jackson, who is also warily watching an initiative supported by unions that could make Cleveland the only city in Ohio that requires employers to pay a 15 an hour minimum wage. The stakes are high. After decades of decline, Cleveland's population reached nearly 397,000 last year, about 1,000 more residents than in 2010, according to the census. The increase in apartment construction corresponds with a spurt in residents living in center city Cleveland, who now number 14,000, up from 6,000 in 2002. City demographers project that the number of downtown residents could climb to 20,000 by 2020. Few projects in downtown Cleveland were as complex as the rebuilding of Public Square. Much of the design, construction and financing of the project was overseen by two civic groups, the Land Studio and the Group Plan Commission. Below ground, engineers reconstructed water, electric and communications infrastructure at a cost of 13 million, paid for by the utilities. Above ground after 37 million more in construction costs, most of it privately financed the Public Square's vehicular traffic patterns were replaced by a splendid and safe pedestrian corridor between new neighborhoods on the downtown's west and east sides. "It's the connector that we always needed," said Ari Maron, a former Land Studio board member and developer of several downtown projects. "Every great city has a central downtown park, a green space to gather. Now we have ours." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
Days before he was found dead in the East River this week, Desmond Amofah, a popular YouTube personality known as Etika whose gaming videos attracted thousands of fans, recorded an eight minute video that worried, rather than amused, his followers. In the video, which has since been removed by YouTube but was copied and posted in other online forums, Mr. Amofah, 29, speaks to the camera as he walks down a street. The sounds of the city sirens, traffic form a backdrop to his reflections on life and mental illness and his apologies to family and friends. At times emotional, he says he had turned down help from people who offered it to him. "One thing I did not realize was that the walls were closing around me so fast," he says. Alarmed family members and friends alerted the New York Police Department, which reported him missing on June 20. His personal belongings were later found on the Manhattan Bridge, and on Wednesday, the authorities confirmed that he had died by suicide. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
Kia Motors is recalling nearly 52,000 Soul hatchbacks from the 2014 model year because the steering system may fail, the automaker said in a report posted on the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration website. The pinion plug on the steering gear assembly had "an improper application of thread locking adhesive," Kia said, adding that "the pinion gear may separate from the steering gear assembly, causing the loss of steering, which could result in a crash." The automaker said it learned of the problem as a result of a warranty claim and that it was not aware of any accidents related to the defect. Hyundai is recalling almost 2,100 Sonata sedans from the 2015 model year because a problem with a wiring harness can result in a sudden lack of power assist to the steering and an inability to move the transmission lever from the park position, the automaker said in a report posted on the safety agency's website. Hyundai said it learned of the problem from a dealer who couldn't shift a new vehicle out of park. The automaker said that it was not aware of any accidents related to the problem. Mercedes Benz is recalling about 300 of its 2014 SL and SLK models because of a problem with air bags supplied by the Takata Corporation, according to a report posted on the agency's website. The automaker says that a part of the passenger side front air bag called the diffuser was not properly attached to the air bag housing. When the air bag deploys in a crash, that part can be propelled into the passenger compartment "and may result in an increased risk of injury," the automaker said. Mercedes said it learned of the problem during routine testing and was not aware of any accidents or injuries related to the defect. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Automobiles |
Additionally, the new policy expands the definition of "public charge" to include anyone who has used noncash public benefits like nonemergency Medicaid, public housing assistance, or Supplemental Nutrition Assistance for more than a year over a three year period. The wealth test targets immigrants seeking permanent resident status based on a petition filed by an American citizen or a permanent resident family member. This may sound like a narrow sliver of the population. In fact, the wealth test's impact will be felt by many. The Migration Policy Institute estimates that the new rule could prompt some 23 million noncitizens and their U.S. citizen family members not to apply for or to withdraw from public benefit programs. This figure includes 4.7 million adults and 7.6 million children, all of whom are citizens. By setting its sights on petitions filed by family members of prospective permanent residents, the wealth test attacks a core principle of our immigration law: family reunification. Such reunification has long been a bete noire of opponents of immigration and white supremacists who fulminate about reclaiming America. Two years ago the White House issued a statement calling for an end to family reunification on the spurious grounds that it attracts unskilled immigrants, lowers wages, increases the deficit and undermines national security. Weeks later, President Trump complained to senators about too much immigration from what he called "shithole countries," like El Salvador and Haiti, and not enough from places like Norway. The wealth test is but another attempt by the Trump administration to revamp the immigration system so that it's based on "merit" (money and education, in other words), rather than family ties or humanitarianism. While a merit based immigration system may appear fair and practical, it is humiliating in its utilitarianism. It reduces people to economic resources, and legal permanent residency and citizenship to transactions. Proponents of the wealth test often say their immigrant forebears didn't depend on cash assistance for needy families, rental assistance or food stamps. These programs are part of the safety net built in the 20th century. Before the welfare state existed, poor immigrants had to give up their children when their husbands died or disappeared. Along with the G.I. Bill, federal housing loans, workers' compensation and Pell Grants, the safety net protects and enriches our country. Indeed, those who say their ancestors didn't get government help as newly arrived immigrants would have to admit that their ancestors also never enjoyed the government benefits, like Medicare and Social Security, that now make these critics comfortable. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Opinion |
COMPTON, Calif. The promise sounded alluring and simple: if enough parents signed a petition, their children's struggling school would be shut down and replaced with a charter school. So, using a new state law known as the parent trigger, organizers at an underperforming school here in Compton collected hundreds of signatures from parents who said they were fed up. Parents were eager, they said, to turn it into a charter school, where students would spend more time in class with a staff of new teachers. After months of legal battles, the status of that petition remains tied up in court. But in the meantime, a new charter school has opened just blocks from the struggling school, and parents at more than a dozen other schools in California are hoping to take advantage of the trigger law, demanding that their schools radically improve. Similar legislation has passed in Texas, Ohio and Connecticut and is being considered in nearly a dozen more states but California, the earliest adopter, is furthest along. And with opponents and skeptics arguing that parents lack the expertise to make important policy decisions better left to career educators, the Compton case is a prime example of how challenging it can be to create change. "We've been waiting for this for a very long time," said Gregoria Gonzalez, a mother of two girls in Lynwood, Calif., who has been involved in her local school for years. "We are very tired of being told if we want to help we simply should stand outside watching recess or making something for a bake sale." As Ms. Gonzalez spoke at a protest rally last week, another mother held up a sign proclaiming, "My child still cannot read." One little girl gripped her own poster that said, "The power is with the parents." But Compton's ordeal illustrated how difficult claiming that power can be and how bitter the battles can become. When parents began signing the petition last fall to replace McKinley Elementary School, several Latino parents said teachers had warned them that they could be deported if they did. Other parents said that teachers insisted the children were simply not trying hard enough to learn. Teachers, for their part, complained that parents had been coerced into signing the petition and that many did not know what they were signing. Compton Unified School District officials challenged the petition in court, which ruled that because the signatures were not dated, the petition was not valid. While organizers appealed that decision in court, the administrators of the charter school, Celerity Sirius, looked for other ways to open a new campus and secured approval for one at a former church and at a campus closed because of low enrollment. Still, by the time school began this month, only about a third of the parents who initially signed the petition ended up enrolling their children in the charter school. While there are children who come from 40 miles away, only a fraction of the charter students are from Compton. "Some people just didn't want to deal with the hassle of having to take their kid somewhere else," said Marlene Romero, a parent who collected dozens of signatures last fall. "They wanted the change to happen at their own school." A few parents say the old school has improved since last fall. Test scores have risen slightly and administrators are more welcoming, several parents said. Ben Austin, the executive director of Parent Revolution, the group that organizes the parents' unions, said that many of the parents who signed the petition had since moved away and that organizers had simply lost touch with others. The group was not involved with the recruitment process for the charter school. Still, Mr. Austin acknowledges there were weaknesses in the Compton effort. "We came in with a prepackaged solution of a charter school and didn't have enough of a deep buy in from enough parents, and we didn't develop enough leadership," Mr. Austin said. This year, he said, the organization will rely on the local parents' unions to ask for the specific changes they want. In some cases, it may be as simple as more consultation from school leaders. "Parents really have to educate themselves, and we all have to know it takes a whole lot more than a signature to solve the problems of the school," he said. "But parents are surely able to do this, and they have to do this. It's the best hope we have for change." There is strong resistance to this whole notion from teachers' unions, which have long relied on steadfast support from parents against budget cuts and other changes. In many ways, the parent trigger can directly undermine their efforts. At a meeting of the American Federation of Teachers this summer, the lobbyist for the Connecticut chapter delivered a presentation outlining the ways that the union was able to weaken the law after unsuccessfully trying to kill it. The presentation made it clear that the union saw the law as a threat. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Education |
If you've watched any science fiction or fantasy movies in the last few decades, you've probably seen the following scenario play out enough times that the next paragraph shouldn't count as a spoiler. An endless horde overwhelms our heroes. Defeat looks inevitable. But wait! There's a central "hive queen" pulling the puppet strings, and if the good guys can just disable that boss, the evil army will collapse. For up to date "Game of Thrones" viewers, this might sound familiar. Similar story lines play out with the "brain bugs" in "Starship Troopers" or the "Mind Flayer" in "Stranger Things." For writers, it's an easy way to flip the bleakest moment of a story into a happy one. "My guess is they do this because they need to figure out a way for the heroes to save the day," said Simon Garnier, the head of the Swarm Lab at the New Jersey Institute of Technology. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
THE BOHEMIANS The Lovers Who Led Germany's Resistance Against the Nazis By Norman Ohler Vergangenheitsbewaltigung is an amalgamation of the German words Vergangenheit, "the past," and Bewaltigung, "coping with," and is often used to describe the effort to grapple with the repercussions of World War II. Children of Holocaust survivors grow up in the war's shadow. Unwittingly, we remain shackled to an inheritance that reverberates through generations. Yet the trauma is not limited to those close to victims. The families of the perpetrators, of those who resisted and of those who failed to act must all cope with the past. The German writer Norman Ohler begins "The Bohemians: The Lovers Who Led Germany's Resistance Against the Nazis" with a powerful scene from his own life that perfectly encapsulates the guilt, grief, anger and remorse that have haunted so many of us. As a 12 year old, Ohler asks his beloved grandfather, his "Pa," about his role in the war. Then an engineer, now a frail old man, he describes seeing SS guards, a freight train and then a child's hand through a crack in the train car's boards. But the grandfather does nothing. "I was scared of the SS," he helplessly explains. Young Ohler is stunned, and in that moment of "stillness you could hear," he cannot contain his hatred for his Pa. Best known in Germany as a novelist, Ohler is also the author of "Blitzed," a controversial 2017 best seller about rampant drug use in the Third Reich. With the opening scene of "The Bohemians," another work of nonfiction, he masterfully establishes his trustworthiness as a narrator, which is crucial as we travel with him back to the 1930s and then on through the war. He weaves a detailed and meticulously researched tale about a pair of young German resisters that reads like a thriller but is supported by 20 pages of footnotes. "I find it particularly important in this case, where the truth has been distorted many times," he writes, "not to add another legend but to report as accurately as possible, combining my skills as a storyteller with the responsibility of the historian." The story he reconstructs is that of Harro and Libertas Schulze Boysen, drawing on letters, articles, diaries and interviews to acquaint us with the couple in all their complexity engaging, bold and flawed. Harro, originally a student activist, underground writer and publisher, and eventually an employee of the German Air Ministry, is the pair's intellectual driving force. He is ambitious and stoic, an idealist. Libertas is more whimsical, and also initially a Nazi Party member. She dreams of being a poet and is working for Metro Goldwyn Mayer when she first encounters Harro. Her decision to resist seems to be based more on circumstance than principle, but she is deeply resourceful and loyal. We feel the couple's triumphs intimately and, as the net tightens around them, their sorrows. Young, passionate and liberal, they defy the regime with their unconventional lifestyle including an open marriage and love of wild gatherings bringing together people of diverse backgrounds and political leanings. And, more dangerously, they pass on information about Nazi atrocities to enemies of the Reich, support Jews, produce pamphlets and establish links with Soviet intelligence. At a time when, as Ohler puts it, "propaganda and suppression increasingly dominate daily life" and "culture is being destroyed," they cut remarkable figures. For decades, Ohler writes, historians were reluctant to carry out a "genuine investigation" of the couple's anti Nazi circle. It was widely believed that German resistance spread little beyond the White Rose and the Stauffenberg plot. For political reasons, both East and West Germany subsequently sought to erase from history details of the brave resistance work of Libertas and Harro and their group. Family and friends were silenced, and in both East and West Libertas and Harro were posthumously lionized as Soviet spies. The reality was more subtle and fraught. Theirs is a tragic tale of defiance, espionage, love and betrayal. Ohler employs the present tense throughout, imbuing his account with a sense of urgency and reminding us that the past in many ways remains our present. His only deviation into the past tense is in the foreword, where he discloses his grandfather's agonized recollection a failure to act for which the resistance narrative of "The Bohemians" serves as a kind of atonement. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
FRANKFURT FOR European officials, it may have been an especially untimely and embarrassing example of political gridlock. Their failure early Saturday to agree on a crucial pillar of the euro zone's new banking architecture, despite 18 hours of haggling, occurred just as the world's central bankers were about to criticize politicians for exactly that kind of dithering. The Bank for International Settlements, a group representing central banks including the Federal Reserve and the European Central Bank, warned political leaders on Sunday that they should not expect central banks' cheap money policy to hold the global economy together forever. The organization, based in Basel, Switzerland, said in its annual report that politicians should do their share of "the hard but essential work of adjustment." "Returning to stability and prosperity is a shared responsibility," Jaime Caruana, the general manager of the organization, said Sunday in Basel, according to a text of his remarks. "Monetary policy has done its part." The report was published a day after a political leaders' meeting in Luxembourg had provided a vivid example of what the central bankers were complaining about. Despite debating well into the early morning on Saturday, European Union finance ministers could not agree on new rules to reduce the chances of taxpayers bearing the burden if commercial banks collapsed. "We ran out of time," Michael Noonan, the Irish finance minister, told reporters as he left the meeting at about 4 a.m. "There are still core issues outstanding, so we'll need a full meeting next week, and there's no guarantee it will reach conclusion." The message from the group in Basel was that central banks cannot enable such inaction indefinitely. "The balance between costs and benefits is deteriorating," said Stephen Cecchetti, head of the monetary and economic department of the Bank for International Settlements, referring to central bank policies that have flooded the world with cheap money since the financial crisis began in 2008. There are already clear signs of central bank retrenchment. The Federal Reserve chairman, Ben S. Bernanke, indicated last week that the American central bank was likely to wind down the purchases of bonds it has used to push down market interest rates. The European Central Bank seems to be running out of ways to stimulate the euro zone, and there is doubt about whether the Bank of Japan can maintain an ambitious policy to flood the economy with money and achieve 2 percent inflation. As long ago as last summer, Mario Draghi, the European bank president, was publicly lamenting the limits of the central bank's ability to address the broader problems of the European economy and calling upon political leaders to pursue structural solutions. Jorg Asmussen, a member of the policy making executive board of the central bank, reiterated that point in a speech on Sunday in Kiel, Germany. "The global reform agenda has lost momentum, as the sense of urgency imposed by the crisis has vanished," he said. But there did not seem to be any awareness of the limits of central bank forbearance among the 17 finance ministers in Luxembourg. The ministers pulled an all nighter to complete their assignment in this case, to establish a system to ensure that taxpayers never again have to pay so much for the mistakes of bankers. The ministers have scheduled another meeting for Wednesday, a day before the leaders of the European Union's 27 member states gather for a summit meeting in Brussels, their last scheduled meeting before the summer hiatus. The leaders have been expected to endorse the finance ministers' decision if there is one. The 18 hour marathon was aimed at breaking the so called doom loop, in which struggling governments go deeper into debt to save their banking systems, only to face sky high borrowing costs. That vicious circle was largely the reason that Ireland and Cyprus required international bailouts, while Spain has struggled to avoid being sucked into a similar vortex. But since agreeing in principle last year to centralize bank supervision in the euro zone and create a system to wind down terminally ill banks, the finance ministers have been snagged on various issues, including how to share the cost. The ministers initially agreed in Luxembourg on Thursday night to let the euro zone's emergency fund the European Stability Mechanism pump money directly into failing banks, on a case by case basis in the latter part of 2014. But then, on Friday, the talks broke down on technical issues, such as whether countries would have the discretion to protect some classes of bank creditors in a crisis. The Bank for International Settlements acts as a financial clearinghouse for most large central banks, including the Fed and the E.C.B., and as a forum for central bankers to discuss policy issues. It uses its annual report to take stock of the global economy. While the organization has criticized politicians in the past, its verdict this year was unusually harsh, and implicitly aimed at Europe, where the central bank has already cut interest rates to a record 0.5 percent. Mr. Draghi, reiterated last week that the central bank for the euro zone remained "ready to act." The Bank for International Settlements also had some harsh words for commercial bankers, particularly in Europe, saying they had failed to make an honest accounting of bad loans and other problems. It urged bankers to sell off damaged assets and raise fresh capital, so that they are able to resume providing credit to businesses and consumers. "Continued low interest rates and unconventional policies have made it easy for the private sector to postpone deleveraging, easy for the government to finance deficits, and easy for the authorities to delay needed reforms in the real economy and in the financial system," the organization said. The organization also disputed claims made by some banks that they have become safer because they have increased the size of the capital they hold as a cushion against losses. Much of the improvement in the amount of capital that banks' have reported recently was "window dressing," achieved by manipulating the way that risk is measured, the organization said. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Global Business |
Jeffrey Katzenberg has a billion to play with for his new short form video platform. His holding company, WndrCo, announced on Tuesday that it had raised 1 billion in its initial investment round, including funds from 10 American media companies and the Chinese technology giant Alibaba. The money will go toward the executive's dream of upending the entertainment industry with high quality bite size content intended for mobile devices. His company, NewTV which is the working title will try to set itself apart from the competition by making and distributing programs mere minutes in length. Mr. Katzenberg, a onetime chairman of Walt Disney Studios and a founder of DreamWorks, hired Meg Whitman, the former chief executive of Hewlett Packard and eBay, to run the show. "She doesn't like this, but I keep saying we're two old dogs who have a new trick," Mr. Katzenberg, 67, said in a phone interview, as Ms. Whitman laughed in the background. Because of Mr. Katzenberg's track record, which also included a stint as the head of production at Paramount Pictures, any move he makes is regarded seriously. But Hollywood has remained skeptical in the year since he announced his venture. Several executives have argued that there is little evidence to support the notion that viewers are craving short programming. And beyond the initial hype, Mr. Katzenberg has been short on specifics. But now the project is coming into focus. Mr. Katzenberg announced on Tuesday that 10 major studios had signed on as backers: the Walt Disney Company, Entertainment One, 21st Century Fox, ITV, Lionsgate, Metro Goldwyn Mayer, NBCUniversal, Sony Pictures Entertainment, Viacom and Warner Media. Strategic partners include Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase and Liberty Global. Ms. Whitman said the biggest investor was Madrone Capital Partners, which has connections to the Walton family of Walmart fame (the retail giant is not itself an investor). And perhaps most intriguing: Mr. Katzenberg has managed to land an investment from Alibaba, although China has remained off limits for many media companies, including Netflix. The 1 billion from investors allows NewTV to begin licensing original programs, particularly from the media companies that have come aboard. Mr. Katzenberg's company will not own the content it streams for on the go viewing. Ford and Rivian no longer plan to work jointly on electric vehicles. Elizabeth Holmes took the stand in her trial. Follow along with our reporters. Ken Griffin, head of Citadel, bid highest for a copy of the Constitution. NewTV has also rented out a few floors at a co working space in West Hollywood, Calif. There are seven people on staff, and Ms. Whitman said she expected that number to move past 200 by 2020. Neither Ms Whitman nor Mr. Katzenberg revealed a date for when NewTV will go live. The streaming company will enter a crowded marketplace. Each passing year sets a record for the number of scripted shows, which will be around 500 this year, and tech giants are aggressively entering the fray, with Apple having earmarked well over 1 billion to create its own original programming for a planned 2019 rollout. All that content may create overload. John Landgraf, the chief executive of the critically favored cable channel FX, spoke last week of the "narrative exhaustion" experienced by viewers who were inundated with too much to watch. Mr. Katzenberg insisted that his service, which will be available by subscription, is playing in a different arena. Rather than competing with Netflix or HBO, it will target viewers looking for quick hit fare to help them pass the time when they are, for example, on the subway or waiting in line at Starbucks. Higher production values will distinguish NewTV's programming from the majority of video shorts that gain traction on YouTube, Mr. Katzenberg said. And he trusts that viewers will appreciate the difference. Writers, producers and directors have been able to please their audiences, he added, but not so much in the area of shorter content. "We keep coming up with new ways to exceed the expectation of our customers," Mr. Katzenberg said, referring to the rise of cable, DVDs and streaming. "Except now, for the first time in history, we have a whole generation of customers that have a new consumption habit, with this thing called short form content. And the professional enterprise of storytellers in Hollywood is nowhere near it. "Customers are ahead of them for the first time," he continued. "We're going to try to chase and catch up with them. They're doing something and we're not a part of it. That's a missed opportunity." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
LONDON Fashion has often been known to stick its head in the glitter dusted sand. But as the great and the good of the international industry descended on the annual Fashion Awards in London on Monday evening (a glamorous event positioned as Britain's answer to the Met Gala), politics was the most popular accessory of the night. Hollywood may be avoiding hard subjects as its awards season kicked off, but as the style set's members made their way up the vast, floodlit red carpet at the Royal Albert Hall, shimmering with scattered crystals (the lead sponsor was Swarovski), slipped into velvet banquettes, sipped Champagne and picked at beef tenderloin, they seemed determined to strike not a pose but a stand. Maria Grazia Chiuri, artistic director of Dior women's wear, clad in black velvet, took to the stage to receive the Swarovski Award for Positive Change and declared, "This moment we are living in isn't actually about sex, it is more about power. Fashion has a duty to speak out for and support and empower women, to help them express themselves." "After 2017, and everything that has happened in the film industry, I'm excited for 2018," she announced, resplendent in a gold turban and kaleidoscopic sequin mini shift by the British brand Halpern (later, the designer Michael Halpern was on stage to collect the prize for best British Emerging Talent in women's wear). "I know all of us in fashion will work together to push out the bad energy; there is no place for that here anymore," Ms. Aboah said. And, in a 14 model tribute to Azzedine Alaia, the legendary designer who died last month in Paris at 82, Naomi Campbell said, "I would never have become the woman I am today without him." Ms. Campbell recalled how Mr. Alaia had not only "fed, clothed and watered" her in the early days of her career, but had also stepped in to defend her in a street attack outside his shop in 2012. "Papa was a protector and a teacher, a seeker and defender," she said. Yasmin Le Bon added, "If we wore Azzedine, we could do anything." And so it went, with an emphasis on female empowerment and achievement. Stella McCartney was given a Special Recognition Award for Innovation. The makeup artist Pat McGrath radiated delight (and nerves) as she accepted the Isabella Blow Award for Fashion Creator. And Donatella Versace, in a spectacular diamante encrusted bustier gown with giant panniers, was named Fashion Icon, 20 years after she assumed control of her brother Gianni's fashion empire following his murder. Still, men scooped many of the blockbuster prizes of the night. Jonathan Anderson was the only name to go home with two awards; Accessories Designer of the Year for his work at the Spanish house Loewe and British Designer of the Year in women's wear for his own line. Charles Jeffrey, in full makeup, wept as he accepted the British Emerging Talent in men's wear award from John Galliano, the man Mr. Jeffrey called his "idol." And Raf Simons won the Designer of the Year award for his work at Calvin Klein, five months after receiving the same accolade at the CFDA Fashion Awards in New York. He started his speech with two expletives and talked through tears. He wasn't the only emotional one. Even Anna Wintour's voice wavered as she presented the Outstanding Contribution to British Fashion Award to Christopher Bailey, the departing creative director of Burberry, speaking of "a quiet bravery" that Mr. Bailey had called upon to construct his empire. "I am sad to see him take his bow, but happy that he will have the time to see his children take bows of their own," she said. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
One of the manuscripts that the Eastern Orthodox Church is seeking to reclaim from Princeton University depicts St. John Climacus and his "Heavenly Ladder." They are simultaneously sacred texts and works of art, three illuminated Byzantine era manuscripts that are more than 1,000 years old and that for decades have been part of a heralded collection at Princeton University. The college received the items as a gift in 1942 from a trustee and alumnus who had bought them from a German auction house nearly 20 years earlier. But in a lawsuit filed Thursday, the spiritual leader of the Eastern Orthodox Church said the manuscripts were stolen and demanded their return, asserting that they had been taken during World War I from a monastery in Kormista, a village in northern Greece. Among the evidence cited in the lawsuit is a volume, "Greek Manuscripts at Princeton, Sixth to Nineteenth Century: A Descriptive Catalogue," which was published in 2010 and identifies some manuscripts in the school's collection as having been removed from the monastery in 1917 by Bulgarian authorities. "This is Princeton's book, issued by the Princeton press, about Princeton's collection, written by Princeton employees," said George A. Tsougarakis, a lawyer for Hughes Hubbard Reed in New York, which represents the patriarch, the monastery and regional church officials in the case. "In our view that's about as concrete an admission as you could get." The university said in a statement Friday that it had full confidence that the provenance research it has done establishes that the manuscripts were not looted. "Based on the information available to us, we have found no basis to conclude that the manuscripts in our possession were looted during World War I or otherwise improperly removed from the possession of the patriarchate," a university spokesman, Michael Hotchkiss, said in an email. The Byzantine era manuscripts sought by the plaintiffs are St. John Chrysostom's "Commentary on the Gospel of Matthew," written in A.D. 955 by the scribe Nikephoros the Notary; St. John Climacus's "Heavenly Ladder" written in A.D. 1081 in Constantinople by the scribe Joseph; and pages from the ninth century that were probably part of "Commentary on the Gospel of Matthew" that may have been rebound at some point to "Heavenly Ladder." In addition, the plaintiffs are asking for the return of a 16th century version of "Commentary on the Gospel of Matthew," which they said was also stolen by the Bulgarian forces in 1917 and bought by Princeton in 1921. The patriarchate first asked for the return of five manuscripts held by Princeton in a letter in 2015 that called them "indelible and invaluable pieces of Byzantine culture" and "hallowed writings that are still cherished and revered by the Eastern Orthodox Church and its faithful." The school said in response at the time that two of the manuscripts then sought had been given as gifts before 1917 to a second monastery, which later sold them. Church officials are no longer seeking the return of those manuscripts while continuing to pursue others. Princeton argued in a letter last year that none of the manuscripts sought by church officials were listed in an inventory compiled at the time of the raid by Vladimir Sis, who was said to have overseen the transport of the items to Bulgaria. The school said the catalog cited by the church contains "broad sweeping references" and "might merit a second edition, revised to reflect findings from the Sis inventory." The Rev. Alex Karloutsos, a New York based assistant to the ecumenical patriarch, said that before the manuscripts were stolen they had been in active use in the monastery, where monks would light candles and incense and read from them during meals and religious services. "They're part of sacred history, and that's our spiritual and cultural identity," he said in a telephone interview, adding that the loss of the manuscripts and the efforts to recover them had been "very painful." The monastery was founded in the fifth century and is one of the oldest in the Greek region of Macedonia. Before the raid, it had become the home of what the lawsuit described as "a remarkable collection of books, relics and valuable Byzantine manuscripts." The visit by the Bulgarian forces was described four days after it occurred in a letter from a local official to the Greek Foreign Affairs Delegation of Sofia. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
FIVE years ago, Steven L. Glazer, an internal medicine doctor in Norwalk, Conn., told his thousand patients that he would no longer be able to care for them because he was going to focus on only a dozen, wealthy patients who could pay his annual fee. With that he entered the world of concierge medicine, a growing subset of medicine where patients pay doctors anywhere from 1,500 to 25,000 a year to receive personalized attention and care. (Dr. Glazer said he was paid toward the top of this range.) In most cases, patients presume that in an emergency their concierge doctor will push them to the front of the line to see a top specialist. Even as more people are struggling to pay medical bills and being rushed through office visits with their doctors, an elite group with money has another option: exclusive medical care, around the clock and anywhere in the world, including on a yacht or private plane. One of Dr. Glazer's clients, for instance, has had his yacht outfitted with a system from Guardian 24/7, a company in Leesburg, Va., founded by former White House doctors that advertises itself as offering "medical protection previously available only to the president of the United States." The company's "ready room" will allow a doctor trained in the system to perform basic medical care remotely if something should go wrong while the patient is on the high seas. "There is very little that we can't do with the triage room on their yacht," he said. The cost of Guardian 24/7's services ranges from 6,000 to 12,000 a month, plus an additional 700,000 for one of the company's top of the line "ready rooms" installed in a client's home, yacht or airplane, said Jonathan Frye, chief executive. While it is difficult to determine how many people are served by this more personalized care, the number of doctors who have moved to this new model has risen fivefold in the last five years. And that raises questions about medical care in America. For those who can afford it, what do they get for their money? Is it worth it? And for the rest of us, who cannot afford this level of care, is it fair and ethical for doctors to be doing this? Or is concierge care contributing to the growing gulf between the wealthy and everyone else? COSTS AND BENEFITS Concierge medical care is nothing new. In places like Florida, with a high concentration of Medicare patients, some upper middle class retirees pay extra fees so they can see a doctor when they need to. MDVIP, which has 450 concierge doctors in 34 states, charges patients 1,500 to 1,800 a year. Their doctors are each limited to 600 patients, whereas, the company says, most primary care physicians serve at least 2,000 patients. It says appointments with doctors "start on time and last as long as necessary" and can usually be made the same day or the next one. The company's fee is for the extended care and comprehensive annual physical and wellness plan, but its doctors still bill the patient's insurance company for procedures. The international, around the clock programs take concierge medicine to a different level. Their primary goal is to offer an extra level of oversight to make sure that participants are getting the proper level of care whenever they need it. Dr. Miles J. Varn, chief medical officer at PinnacleCare Private Health Advisory, which charges annual fees of 1,500 to 25,000, said the starting point for all patients was a complete review of all health records with an emphasis on finding gaps in care. "We have physicians who look for omissions of care or deviations from standard care," Dr. Varn said. "That record travels with them around the world." In promoting themselves, the plans say their doctors know each patient's health conditions intimately and are able to discuss it with another doctor anywhere in the world. Dr. Daniel Carlin, founder and chief executive of World Clinic, which charges 20,000 to 75,000 a year on average, said he recently had to intervene and stop a patient from getting the wrong procedure. The client was at a hospital in Florida where the doctors wanted to do bypass surgery for a blocked vessel. Dr. Carlin said the proper care was putting in a stent, and the difference was months of pain and recovery for the patient and tens of thousands of dollars for the hospital. Dr. Varn said more than half of the company's members were in a program that costs 10,000 a year, or about 800 a month on top of whatever private insurance members may have. "How much do you pay to have your lawn mowed every year?" he asked. "Why wouldn't you pay to get the same advice on your health? People think having great insurance means having great health care and that's not the case." Beyond personalized primary care, the main selling point for high end plans is access to top specialists when needed. Yet it is difficult to determine just how much shorter the wait is for the specialist. "We regularly would engage with our clients to facilitate and get them to the appropriate specialist," said Dr. Sean O'Mara, founder and president of Guardian 24/7 and a former Army doctor who was on call when the president or top Cabinet members traveled to South Korea. "We have an extensive Rolodex of medical specialists that we're familiar with." Mark Murrison, president of marketing and innovation at MDVIP, said: "When the doctor makes that personal call to the specialist, that has a meaningful impact on getting that patient into see the physician quicker than they would be able to on their own." Beyond that, these companies argue that they help members locate the right doctor, something they would have more trouble doing on their own. FAIRNESS DEBATE Unlike professions where money is a primary goal, doctors are obligated by their ethical code to provide care for people in need. This becomes an issue when their practices are confined to the wealthy, and it elicits complaints that concierge medicine caters to the elite. "This isn't fair," said Dr. Carlin, who worked as refugee camp doctor and in an emergency room before starting World Clinic. "I'm a small solution to a vast health care problem." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Your Money |
Hannah Arendt would have eviscerated the title of "The Origins of Totalitarianism" had she not been the book's author. Though published in 1951, it is still the most influential work on the worst of Europe's 20th century horrors. Yet contrary to its title's claim to uncover "origins," Arendt would have insisted that all efforts to speak in such clear cut terms about causality were bound to be reductive, alien to the true pulse of history. "Not only does the actual meaning of every event always transcend any number of past 'causes' which we may assign to it," she wrote in an essay appearing shortly after her magnum opus, "this past itself comes into being only with the event itself." For years now, the German historian Gotz Aly has been looking for causes. In densely documented book after book packed with the bureaucratic memorandums that are the core of his evidentiary universe he has sought "to discern the utilitarian goals behind the murder of the European Jews." Aly is an earnest, tireless compiler of the often arcane or overlooked, yet there is something raw, never quite finished, if always usefully suggestive, in his approach. It was the goal of robbing Jews of their wealth that dominated his early research. Later, "Why the Germans? Why the Jews?" would identify a stultifying envy of Jews, wealthy or not, as the prime motive of the Holocaust, the infuriating sense in Germany and elsewhere, too, that Jews, in the words of Maxim Gorky, were "obviously better, more adroit and more capable." Now in his most ambitious effort, "Europe Against the Jews: 1880 1945," which is billed as a "prehistory of the genocide," Aly elaborates on the thesis that the Nazi effort to eradicate an entire people is explainable as "rational," if, of course, also deplorable. He now sees the origins of the Holocaust in the consolidation of nationalism around the turn of the 20th century. Above all, the welter of new nation states to emerge from the slaughterhouse of World War I is identified as the essential station on the road to ethnic cleansing, and worse. At the book's start, Aly cites the playwright and Jewish political leader Israel Zangwill, who asked a 1907 audience to ponder what it might mean for Jewish immigrants if they were unable to locate a new home and were compelled to return to Europe. Imagine, Zangwill wondered, if "300,000 Jews came back." Aly's answer is emphatic: "Some 30 years later, Germany and Poland demonstrated exactly what would happen." Want to keep up with the latest and greatest in books? This is a good place to start. None Learn what you should be reading this fall: Our collection of reviews on books coming out this season includes biographies, novels, memoirs and more. See what's new in October: Among this month's new titles are novels by Jonathan Franzen, a history of Black cinema and a biography by Katie Couric. Nominate a book: The New York Times Book Review has just turned 125. That got us wondering: What is the best book that was published during that time? Listen to our podcast: Featuring conversations with leading figures in the literary world, from Colson Whitehead to Leila Slimani, the Book Review Podcast helps you delve deeper into your favorite books. Less than two decades after Zangwill's question the die was cast. The postwar world had unleashed new nation states with license to practice an ethnic homogenization to the benefit of the majority. Such majorities Poles, Ukrainians, Romanians rose to political power to the detriment of Europe's increasingly marginalized, often embattled minorities. Buttressed by ideology not infrequently liberal but fueled, as often as not, by rank ethnic prejudice, the expulsion of minorities would soon find itself "an acceptable European political practice." Any protections of minorities, like those internationally affirmed in the wake of World War I, soon proved toothless above all, for Europe's Jews. Thus, in a world defined by nationalism, Jews, in the words of Hannah Arendt, were left with "no right to reside in any country on earth." There's little surprise that before her rise as a political theorist, Arendt was a Zionist activist. Much of Aly's book is a country by country dissection of the backdrop to nationalism that, as he explains, set in motion the lexicon first for the exclusionary policies of the 1930s, then the murderous practices of the 1940s. He tracks the evolution of these trends from the late 19th century. But if judged on the basis of his treatment of czarist Russia, home to half the Jews of the world at the turn of the 20th century, his knowledge beyond Germany feels sparse. Pogroms weren't "state sanctioned," the 15 provinces of the Pale of Settlement were not a "giant ghetto" and the regime had no coherent policy with regard to Jewish emigration. Even with regard to Germany, Aly never manages to capture Nazism's all encompassing anti Jewish hatred, the "torrent of ideological fanaticism" in the words of the eminent historian Saul Friedlander "the murderous fury" that "would explode in an unlimited urge for destruction and death." Rarely in Aly's work does one find more than history's unadorned bricks, which seem insufficient in explicating the underpinnings of the horror. Still, Aly has a masterly command of the facts of the Nazi catastrophe, its bricks and mortar amassed in all their mountainous detail. And the details he captures are all the more crucial because they are generally inaccessible in secondary sources elsewhere. Curiously, Aly sees his new book as something more than a historical narrative: It is, he suggests, a guide for how "to prevent similar horrors from happening in the future." Thus, it begins (this a jarring turn for a study of the backdrop to Nazi genocide) with Zionism's progenitor, Theodor Herzl. In Aly's version, Herzl sought to guide the construction in the Middle East of a European inspired, Jewishly homogeneous nation state, with its predictable outcome: the dismissal of the land's indigenous population, a tragedy that festers to the present day. Herzl is portrayed, at the same time, as a prescient prophet of doom, who sees more starkly than most the dangerous development in Europe of a view of Jews as disruptive immigrants, subversive radicals and intolerable economic competitors. Herzl's solution, as Aly sums it up, is Jewish settlement on the "empty spaces on earth" so that Jews can create "a homogeneous nation at peace with itself." This he culls from Herzl's diaries. But the problem once again is with Aly's inclination to flatten his details. Herzl does indeed say all that Aly attributes to him, but as the Harvard historian Derek Penslar has observed, Herzl's diaries are not a readily transparent source for his politics since they're often punctuated by fevered speculations on matters contradicted by Herzl elsewhere. This is especially true with regard to his late life novel "Old New Land," the work probably dearest to Herzl's heart, where Palestine is depicted as a social utopia with Arabs and Jews living peacefully side by side. There the villain is a heinous Jewish ethnocentric. Aly's book appears, of course, at a moment when anti Semitism seems ascendant, yet also when the chasm between proponent and foe is more confounding than ever. Israel's Benjamin Netanyahu is now the most articulate, respectable proponent of much the same far right nationalist populism that has historically nurtured anti Jewish hatred. And in the United States the White House continues to stoke anti Semitism's embers, branding others as purveyors of hate while itself remaining the bearer of insidious messages that cut deep into public life. Aly's reminder of the usefulness of taking a close look at the quiet horrors of Europe's interwar years thus, despite the shortcomings of his new book, feels all the more valuable today. And his acknowledgment that comparisons between now and then once the province of the ill informed deserve more serious attention from historians and others is just one of many reminders as to how far we've stumbled into an age of troubled sleep. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
AMSTERDAM An art crimes investigator in the Netherlands said Tuesday that he had recovered Pablo Picasso's 1938 painting "Portrait of Dora Maar," which was stolen from the yacht of its Saudi Arabian owner in the south of France in 1999. Arthur Brand, an independent art detective based in Amsterdam, handed the painting over to an insurance company two weeks ago, he said. Mr. Brand had been trying to track down the Picasso painting since 2015, but all of his leads went nowhere. Earlier this month, he said, he was contacted by "two persons with good contacts in the underworld," who said the painting was in the Netherlands. "They told me, 'It's in the hands of a businessman who got it as payment, and he doesn't know what to do with it,'" Mr. Brand said in an interview. "I talked to the two guys and we made a plan to get it out of his hands." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
Auria Abraham is usually a Thanksgiving "nomad," sometimes hosting friends at the home she shares with her husband and 12 year old daughter in Brooklyn, other times visiting family. This year, more than ever, she yearned to spend the holiday in Massachusetts, where a close family member is recovering from an illness. Although she wanted to lend her love and support in person, Ms. Abraham, 52, felt the risk of the coronavirus would have been too high. "The first week of November, we started to see the numbers rising and I began to have an inkling that maybe this might all be 'the best laid plans,'" said Ms. Abraham, the founder of Auria's Malaysian Kitchen, a manufacturer of sambals and other Malaysian foods. "The hardest part for me was for us to not be there." Even her daughter, she said, picked up on her sadness. "She knew that trying to be together for a few days was so necessary this year." It's natural to take stock of the year that was when the holidays roll around. Through the lens of travel, 2020 for many has been about well, nothing and nowhere. Ms. Abraham and other would have been trip takers are left grappling with a specific loss, not only about places not seen and experiences not had, but also milestones not celebrated, people not hugged and time that's impossible to get back. They are also questioning whether they have any right to feel sadness, given the widespread illness, death and economic turmoil caused by the virus. "Generally speaking, it's not as challenging to lose some things compared to others, but it is possible to grieve the loss of our own future, our own health anything we consider valuable," said M. Katherine Shear, the founder and director of the Center for Complicated Grief at the Columbia School of Social Work. Early this year, Judy Mallory, 71, bought her grandson, Max, a yellow Paddington Bear inspired raincoat: the perfect accessory for their planned September vacation to London and Belgium. Along came the pandemic. The trip which would have been with Ms. Mallory's son and daughter in law unraveled: no charming Airbnb in London's Notting Hill, no Eurostar to Brussels, no watching Max, who will turn 2 in February, absorb his first international setting. 'We're kind of running out of time' Others have also struggled with accepting a new, uncertain future. In January, Susan Romanoff Baum found herself sitting on the beach on Espanola Island, in the Galapagos, newly retired from the educational resources company she co founded in 1991. With the majestic landscape spread out before her the cerulean waters of Gardner Bay, the splashes of red from the Sally Lightfoot crabs the future looked bright. "I knew that I wanted to be a citizen of the world and travel, and hopefully spread some good," said Ms. Baum, 73, who lives in Great River, N.Y. In February and March, Ms. Baum and her husband of 51 years were set for their third Ethiopia tour with the education nonprofit H2 Empower. There was also a European vacation with friends slated for September and October. "We're pretty energetic and fit people," Ms. Baum said. "But we're kind of running out of time to do the things we really wanted to do we wanted to hit the ground running." This spring, as her plans collapsed, Ms. Baum tried to keep her sadness and disappointment in check: Infection rates in New York were peaking, hospitals were filling. "How dare I think that my travels were important?" she reminded herself. Then, a beloved uncle died and Ms. Baum had to attend the funeral in Ohio over Zoom. "People forget that travel isn't just about the fun stuff," she said. "It's also about being able to be places where you can support one another and be around the people you love." That is also true for happy occasions. Emily Alvarez, 33, who lives in the Woodland Hills neighborhood of Los Angeles, watched several trips fall prey to the pandemic this year, including a swing through Nice, France, to meet her best friend's two children for the first time, and her brother and sister in law's baby shower in Orlando, Fla. Most of all, though, Ms. Alvarez had been looking forward to her Cuban American family's annual Noche Buena, or Christmas Eve, celebration in her hometown, Miami. "That's when traditionally we roast a big pig and we have black beans and rice and everybody's gathered and dancing," said Ms. Alvarez, the co founder of 360 PMI, a website development company. Ms. Alvarez said she is torn between the feeling of sadness and the feeling that she "dodged a bullet." With an underlying health condition, she didn't want to gamble. "I'd been really hanging onto hope for a long time," Ms. Alvarez said. "It became real when I finally told my mom, 'Hey, I'm not going to purchase airline tickets.'" Janae Melvin, 40, of Kansas City, Kan., also contended with conflicting emotions this year while watching her family's two vacations fall through. After qualifying and fund raising for the prestigious American Youth Baseball Hall of Fame Invitational Tournament, Ms. Melvin's son's youth baseball team was bound for Cooperstown, N.Y., in June. Ms. Melvin's 9 year old daughter's dance company, meanwhile, had been selected for Dance The World Broadway, a whirlwind of theater focused events and workshops that would have also brought the family to New York City for the first time. "People didn't get to go to their high school graduations," said Ms. Melvin, a special events coordinator for Perfect Game Midwest, which organizes and promotes youth baseball and fast pitch tournaments. "People weren't able to see family. And here I was, worried about a baseball game." That sort of reasoning is a common coping mechanism, said Dr. Shear, the grief expert. "Whenever we're dealing with painful emotions, it's natural to wonder whether we can do anything about it," Dr. Shear said. "And if we can't, we usually want to do something to help manage the pain. One way is by reminding ourselves that it could have been a lot worse." Although Ms. Melvin knows she'll eventually see the Statue of Liberty, the baseball trip is another matter: Her son will turn 13 in mid December, and the invitational is limited to 12 year olds. "As a parent, it's hard on your heart," Ms. Melvin said. "You just don't want your babies to lose things they've worked so hard for." 'We have to be able to find joy' Earlier this year, Doreen Agboh front loaded her courses so she could spend "senior spring" the last semester of medical school, before residency begins traveling to Colombia, Costa Rica and elsewhere. "In general, as a doctor, you're never going to have four months of time off unless you build it into your life but then that means no salary," said Dr. Agboh, 28, now an emergency medicine resident physician in Chicago. "There will never be this time again where I have the freedom and the ability to do what I want whenever I want. And, for me, that 'wanting' was travel." Instead, Dr. Agboh spent much of her senior spring grounded in New Jersey, first in her medical school apartment in Newark, then in her hometown of Westampton, N.J. "I was grieving a lot," she said. "I was very sad and anxious the things that I had guaranteed myself were no longer there." When she finishes her residency in three years, Dr. Agboh may pursue a fellowship or start a new job. She could also be married with children. For now, she is focused on working hard and getting to know her new city. "I've accepted that life may never be the same, but that doesn't mean that you shouldn't do things that make you happy we have to be able to find joy," she said. The Baums adopted a similar mind set, reacquainting themselves with their hamlet by bird watching and soaking in sunrises at the local marina. "I think there are a lot of facets to losing travel," Ms. Baum said. "We've had to rethink how we're going to do things, but it doesn't mean you have to stop learning." Ms. Alvarez is wrestling with the fact that she won't be able to attend her cousin's wedding in January. But she acknowledged that her connection to her family has remained strong, despite the distance: "I don't need to go home for Christmas to realize that our relationship is special," she said. Ms. Mallory, for her part, is eager to get to London with her grandson. "I'm really hoping the opportunity comes around," she said. "Max can have another raincoat if we go it will probably just have to be a bigger size." And although Ms. Abraham, who wasn't able to make it to Massachusetts for Thanksgiving, also had a family Christmas trip to Malaysia crumble, she still considers herself lucky. "Every day we say our thank yous for what we have, and who we have, in our lives I'm knocking on wood," she said. Follow New York Times Travel on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook. And sign up for our weekly Travel Dispatch newsletter to receive expert tips on traveling smarter and inspiration for your next vacation. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
Yesterday we challenged Well readers to take on the case of a 63 year old artist who, over the course of several months, developed excruciating headaches, along with changes in his personality, his thinking, even in the way he painted. We provided you with some of the doctor's notes and medical imaging results that led the doctor who finally made the diagnosis in the right direction. After an extensive evaluation, that doctor asked a single question that led him to make the diagnosis. We asked Well readers to figure out the question the doctor asked and the diagnosis it suggested. It must have been a tough case or else you were all too worried about the coming election to rise to the challenge because we got just over 200 responses, fewer than usual. Of those, only six of you figured out the right diagnosis, and only three of you got the question right as well. Despite that, I was very impressed by the thinking of even those who didn't come up with the right diagnosis. Many of you thought about environmental factors like his recent retirement and his exposure to possible toxins from his painting, and that kind of thinking was, in my opinion, the very essence of thinking like a doctor. Strong work, all of you. The question the doctor asked that led him to the correct diagnosis was: Can you hear your heartbeat in your ears? The patient could. And that suggested the diagnosis: The first reader to suggest this diagnosis was Dr. Adrian Budhram, a neurology resident at Western University in London, Ontario. His is a familiar name in this column. He is a three time Think Like a Doctor winner whose last win was just last month. If this keeps up, I'm afraid that I'm going to have to institute the rule from the radio quiz show "Whad'ya Know?": "Listeners who have won recently should sit on their hands and let someone else have a chance for a change." Still, Dr. Budhram impressive achievement! Well done! An arteriovenous fistula is an abnormal connection between the high pressure arterial system the thick muscular blood vessels that carry blood forcefully pumped out by the heart to provide oxygen to the rest of the body and the low pressure venous system, made up of the thinner, more elastic vessels through which the blood is pushed back into the heart. Normally, blood flows from the heart into arteries and then to tiny capillaries, where the circulation slows and the nutrients and oxygen can move into the tissues. From there, the blood flows into the veins, where it is pushed onward, back to the heart. AV fistulas occur most commonly in the legs but can occur anywhere in the body including, very rarely, the brain. Once these abnormal connections form, they cause two immediate problems. First, the arterial blood is diverted from its normal pathway, and so the downstream tissues can be injured by the loss of expected blood flow. Fortunately, our bodies are well protected against this kind of loss and can quickly grow new vessels, called collaterals, that carry blood around the bypass to the starving tissues beyond. The second problem is what happens to the more delicate veins when they are hit with the high pressure blood flow from the heart. Once the abnormal connection forms, the less muscular veins are damaged and, over time, become thickened and scarred and eventually are blocked completely. As these vessels narrow and close, the body's ability to create collaterals kicks in and more veins are created to take the blood that can no longer go through, creating, eventually, a sometimes vast network of abnormal vessels to handle the misdirected arterial blood. Sometimes these new veins connect with other venous systems and can cause these veins to thicken and scar up as well, extending the damage even further. In this patient, the abnormal connection between artery and vein occurred in the brain. The initial injury occurred in the dura, the tough outer layer of the meninges the tissue surrounding the brain. That's why the meninges looked swollen and lumpy in the M.R.I. they had become crisscrossed with hundreds of scarred abnormal veins, carrying the blood from the misdirected artery. The symptoms caused by fistulas in the dura are usually headache and pulsatile tinnitus, in which the sound of arterial pulsations become audible to the patient. This patient had those symptoms, but he had other symptoms as well: How he saw the world changed, as evidenced by his paintings. And his speech and thinking slowed. This wide array of symptoms suggest that it wasn't just the lining of the brain that was affected, but the brain itself. One of the dangers of the dural fistula is that it can spread into the vessels of the brain, and that was what happened to this patient. When these abnormal vessels begin to propagate and scar over, then parts of the brain are starved of needed oxygen and nutrients and stop working. Caught early, the damage can be reversed. Without intervention the damage can become permanent. Treatment is to block the abnormal blood flow between artery and vein. This is done through a delicate series of procedures in which the abnormal veins are filled with coils, glue and plastic. Once these abnormal vessels are closed off, the blood will resume its more normal pathway and, if there is no scarring, function will normalize. Getting to those abnormal vessels is difficult and requires knowledge, agility and experience. How the Diagnosis Was Made The 63 year old painter started getting excruciating headaches not long after starting to paint in oil a change from the acrylics and watercolors he'd used in the past. Over the course of a few months, these headaches went from being occasional and tolerable to daily and excruciating. In addition to the headaches, the man began to exhibit changes in behavior that, while subtle, did not escape the notice of his wife of many years. She saw her husband become more quiet and withdrawn. She had difficulty engaging him in conversation and that was new. And, she noticed, he began to be forgetful. He couldn't remember where he put his keys, or parked his car. Odd Changes, Even in Paint His habits, long established, changed. Always a very organized person, he began to put things in the wrong places as if he forgot the right place. He was clumsier and stumbled over his own feet. Walking and driving, he drifted to the right. Finally, Dr. Smith asked what turned out to be the key question: Can you hear your heartbeat in your ears? The man looked surprised. Well yes, he could. It had started 10 years before, after a devastating high speed accident in which a drunken driver traveling at over 80 miles per hour had slammed into his car. The impact had sent his car rolling off the freeway and up against a tree. He was slammed against the steering wheel with such force that his rib cage was broken and his heart was damaged. He'd spent days in an intensive care unit as his heart was monitored and the crazy rhythms caused by the injury were controlled. His wife suffered from multiple broken vertebrae in her back and had to use a wheelchair for a time. It was after that terrible accident that the patient started hearing his heartbeat, mostly on the right side. At the time, he asked several of his doctors about it and they reassured him that it was usually nothing. So he stopped mentioning it. And no one had ever asked him about it, until now. Then Dr. Smith did something else that no one had ever done before: He placed his stethoscope over the patient's right eyelid and listened. After a minute, he moved his stethoscope to the area just behind the patient's ear and listened there. I can hear it, he told the patient. I hear what you hear, loud and clear. Then he stepped out and returned with a half dozen residents and students. Can they listen to your skull, he asked the patient? Sure. And each carefully laid their stethoscopes where Dr. Smith indicated. You will probably never see this again in your entire career, he told them. Based on the imaging and the patient's symptoms and now this tinnitus, Dr. Smith explained to patient and trainees, he figured that a fistula in the dura that had recently spread to the brain was the most likely diagnosis. It was an extremely rare vascular defect. He'd seen it only once before, when he was in training. His attending at the time recognized it and, thanks to that, he recognized it as well. The worsening headaches, personality changes and other symptoms probably arose when the fistula moved beyond the lining of the brain and began to cause these abnormal veins to form in the brain itself. The patient reports that he was 85 percent back after the first procedure, 90 percent back after the second and 100 percent back after the third. His wife says that maybe he's not quite 100 percent back, but he's darned close. He's talking again. He's driving again. And, she's happy to report, the paintings he's doing now hark back to the man she married. You can see one of his recent paintings here. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Well |
We'd drive southwest on Interstate 81, eating barbecue until we hit Memphis. The idea was juvenile in its simplicity, but amid planning a wedding and being a month from turning 30, something juvenile and simple was what I craved. I am a native New Yorker, in a family of waning Italian heritage, so my opinions on barbecue have been treated as an eccentricity. Was my hot dog no good? Perhaps I'd like a burger instead? To my fiancee, Mary Beth, Virginia born and North Carolina raised, I was eccentric only in the wide tent I pitched for smoked meat. To most anyone from the Piedmont Crescent in North Carolina, barbecue is not a style of cooking; it's a specific dish: chopped pork topped with a spicy vinegar sauce. Zeal for such a noble meal is only appropriate in her eyes. Ribs, however, are not barbecue. Ribs are ribs. Beef is a wholly different dish. And God help those yellow lipped South Carolinians, with their heathenous mustard based condiments. Regardless, Mary Beth was (inexplicably) enthusiastic about splitting a 3,000 mile drive with me, so she's clearly the best person I know. The trip felt like a fitting stress test before we would vow to share the rest of our lives with each other. Outside of Harrisburg, past an overgrown football field, we found ShakeDown BBQ. A huge four chamber grill on wheels had been wrapping the building in apple wood smoke for hours. I'm a sucker for a wood log fire, but I knew that wouldn't guarantee good food. Behind a small counter was a towering blackboard detailing the owner's newest sandwich creations. Rules are anathema to road trips, but I felt it important to lay out some guidelines, if only to focus the debate. Guideline No. 1: If the restaurant offered a sampler or combo platter, we should order it. Guideline No. 2: Pork products would be our focus of scrutiny. We expected few joints east of the Mississippi would hazard an attempt at Texas style brisket. Guideline No. 3: Our highest priority for sides would be beans and greens, the true destiny of those overdone nubs of barbecued meat called burnt ends. Not every restaurant seasons its greens with burnt ends but I imagined that a week of nonstop barbecue, without vegetables, could put us at a legitimate risk for scurvy. We began to deviate from guideline No. 2 on our first stop. ShakeDown's pulled pork was easily overshadowed by a dark beef brisket. But the pork sausage was the obvious breakout: sweet, robust and right at home between two sides of a bun. The platter had been dusted with a chile and spice blend, and the beans were cumin forward. The meal had a very earthy profile, nontraditional for barbecue, at least from a Southerner's perspective but perhaps not to the area's German descendants. And there were sauces aplenty: "Regular" Tennessee sauce; a very "Spicy" variant; a vinegar based "Carolina"; and a "Creamy Carolina" dipping sauce, seemingly inspired by white coleslaw. More accurate than most tests, the selection of the house sauces, we would find, was the best sign of good barbecue. Shakedown's lineup scratched every itch I had, but my resident Carolinian thought that most of their sauces were approximated facsimiles. Just over the border in Maryland, in Hagerstown, we stopped at the coyly named Hempen Hill BBQ, a sprawling sports bar crowded with folks looking to cure the munchies. It would be one of the only restaurants on our trip with a wait. The menu tries to do a bit of everything, from Bay seasoned crab chips (hey, it's Maryland) to smoked prime rib (too large to finish, though we tried). Here, too, the pork sausage (a new menu item, our server told us) outclassed all other offerings: skin crisped from fire, a soft and savory interior, and arresting flavor. But even with three house sauces, an exemplary pork sandwich eluded us. The following morning, we arrived in Virginia. Down the street from the Museum of the Shenandoah Valley, a lovely collection of galleries and gardens, we found Bonnie Blue Southern Market Grocery in Winchester. The roadside cafe and bakery is in a renovated auto body garage, with plenty of indoor and outdoor tables, all painted fire engine red. Route 81 hadn't carried us far enough south for the kielbasa not to be a standout: The biscuits and gravy were a tremendous wake up meal. But now the pulled pork was getting serious: juicy, smoky, a balancing act between salt and spices. The beans practically included a second helping of pork, and the greens, tangy and tender, were the best of the trip. Spirits high, we turned off to travel a strip of the Blue Ridge Parkway, a treasure in itself. The campsites that service motorcades of picnickers are equipped with public grills, and they would see a lot of use once the leaves turned. At over 5,000 feet, with the air so big and thin, folks would smell your dinner a mile away, and it made me wonder if hospitality is knowing you should expect company. Was barbecue first defined only by its open, inviting aroma? If so, my family's hot dogs and hamburgers might not be off the mark after all. No guest goes hungry in my mother's house. Driving down the mountain, we stopped at BeamMeUp BBQ, found in a little beige house on the far edge of Lexington, Va. The last rack of ribs walked out the door before we could order, a disappointment but also a good sign. This was the first pulled pork to make Mary Beth give that signature giddy smile. The pulled meat had great texture and, even before sauces, a complex flavor. The brisket, gleaming like a slab of petrified wood, dissolved instantly upon first bite. That texture doesn't come without a robust knowledge of temperature, salt and even humidity. The house's classic "Carolina" sauce was an obvious match for the pork, but the "dark and spicy" sauce ruled the brisket. Mary Beth, staring down her state's rival, wasn't having any of this mustard stuff. But both sides are guilty of dogmatism: Stephen Colbert, a proud South Carolinian, once suggested that North Carolina's Piedmont vinegar sauce is better employed as a toilet bowl cleaner. I blanketed my brisket in smoky mustard and, yellow lips and all, offered a satisfied grin. "Well, it's different if you put it on brisket," she argued. So the wedding was still on. After days of travel, we finally entered Mary Beth's home turf: the Piedmont Crescent. I had been surprised by how many restaurants strained themselves to serve every cut, every sauce, every regional quirk their customers might desire. Lexington Barbecue in Lexington, N.C., is on a different level: The hickory smoked pork shoulder can be sliced, chopped or coarsely chopped, and a laboratory of condiments ("smokehouse" sauce, Texas Pete, Tabasco ...) is on every table. The decades appear to have taught Lexington not to argue the details with barbecue fans. But the details are what make Lexington so good. The sandwich itself was a high wire act of sweet, tangy, tender, smoky, spicy, and even crunchy from the slaw. It's a joy as simple as it is complex. Farther west, into the North Carolina Appalachians, is Countryside Barbeque in Marion. The restaurant usually has a booth available and, if not, there are rocking chairs on the porch for taking in the mountain air. Like the one at Lexington Barbecue, the pork sandwich rules the menu at Countryside. When the neon "RIBS" sign is on, you'll know you're in luck; it's the only item that one ups the sandwich. While Countryside's meat isn't quite as perfected as Lexington's, its three house sauces are life changing in our case, literally. Years ago, Mary Beth invited me on a trip to the Carolinas and insisted on lunch at Countryside, an old family tradition. She would later tell me, "Only someone who loved you could watch you inhale that rack of ribs and still want to go home with you." Some couples have their song; Countryside's Western Carolina is our sauce. We fell in love to that sauce. Barbecue fans will understand. Cars are always double parked around mealtime at the Original Ridgewood Barbecue in Bluff City, Tenn., not easily done at a big restaurant in a small town of about 1,700 residents. The restaurant, run almost entirely by women, serves smoked hams, sliced and then crisped on a griddle in the open kitchen. The house sauce is aggressively sweet without tasting imbalanced. The beans are a must, balanced with onion and celery, a generations old recipe served in cute brown crocks. While waiting to pay for our meal at the register, I let out a sigh of satisfaction. "I know that noise," said the very tall man next to me. We stood together and chuckled. That's good barbecue: It's simple, easy to enjoy and it makes us all neighbors. Near a small marina on the outskirts of Knoxville, we hit Sweet P's BBQ and Soul House. No musicians were playing that day, but the signs and extra bar made it clear the "Soul House" wasn't for kicks. The pork and brisket in the sampler were delicious but the ribs were masterfully laid with flavor, a smack in the face with a "Welcome to Tennessee" sign. Dusted with cracked pepper, large sugar granules and dark paprika, there was no need for sauce though we tried it anyway. The "Hot," a combination of its "Piedmont" sauce and a chipotle puree, was heaven or heatstroke. I didn't care which. Here we lost guideline No. 3: beans and greens. Mary Beth and I decided instead to cool off with banana pudding. It was so good, we detoured for seconds on our drive back home. The most interesting note our conversations found was how some spots, especially in North Carolina, seemed to intentionally serve slightly dry meat, so as to help it absorb a sauce. Indeed, more than a few restaurants seemed to serve a meat just to have something for the sauce to go on. The biggest disappointment was that, despite no small amount of agony over sauces and meats and wood smoke, few restaurants could be bothered to use fresh baked buns. Not so in Nashville. There, we visited with Mary Beth's cousin, who pointed us toward Edley's Bar B Que on 12 South. Befitting its location in the home of country music, the large renovated garage is done up with warm wood beams and benches, hanging lights and pumping music. Despite such a polished experience and well rehearsed service, the prices were no higher than the roadside places we'd grown accustomed to. A rib'wich was offered as the daily special, something I didn't expect to find on this trip, so there went our last surviving guideline: order the combo. There were no regrets. Scott's pigs are smoked whole hog (think of a luau) then minced, sauced, slapped on a bun, and wrapped like any common deli sandwich. Only that wasn't a common deli sandwich; it gave most of North Carolina a run for its money. The ribs, practically a confit, lacked a spicy bark or crust, but were tremendously tender. Even at 9 in the morning, customers were picking up racks of ribs to serve for lunch. But these were not the dry and spicy Memphis ribs I'd heard of. Had we been driving in the wrong direction? Yet soon there we were on Central Avenue, staring down a blue statue of the University of Memphis's Tom the tiger, which guards Central BBQ. The line was already out the door. Behind the parking lot was a large mural of farm animals playing in a jazz band and inside was wall to wall merchandise. Even with the music turned low, the whole joint felt loud. The scant indoor seating filled up quickly, so we ate under a tent rigged with water misters to allay the 100 degree heat. The pork and brisket were great, but the ribs, dry and red as Australia's Simpson Desert, were clearly the best: tug apart tender with a rolling spiciness. Across town is the Bar B Q Shop. A bar and grill tucked into a mostly residential block on Madison Avenue, it was quiet for lunch but would attract a crowd for dinner. The waiters knew to push their claim to fame: barbecue spaghetti, basically a sweet and meaty pasta Bolognese. Even after a week of solid barbecue, it was still a pleasure to eat, if a guilty one. Like Lexington's chopped pork, Bar B Q Shop's ribs were another high wire act of flavors and textures. Sauce might have been the main draw in the Carolinas, but the Bar B Q Shop produces such a perfect rack of meat, sauce is rather unnecessary, almost unwelcome. It was the end of our trip, but I wanted to keep driving west. To have a grand barbecue road trip that didn't even enter Missouri or Texas ... what would people say? It had begun to rain aggressively after we left the Bar B Q Shop, but I drove us out to the Memphis Riverfront. Parked in front of the Mississippi, I began to lay out Barbecue Road Trip Part 2 and the idea that maybe we should hit a few spots in Alabama? I mean, the state border is right there. Mary Beth just smiled at me. I think she knew that after a week of barbecue, I was all talk, and once our last plate of ribs kicked in, I couldn't manage much talking either. We were tired and we were full and all we really wanted to do was go home and get married. So we did. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
PARIS Journeymen get a bad rap. Heads down, they perform with efficiency the tasks they are handed, take the check and go home. Seldom are they known for diva tantrums. In the case of Kim Jones, home is merely a stopover, a place (actually, there are two, one in London and another on the beautiful Place des Victoires in Paris) to stow the luggage he carries on his continual travels. And his job as the creative director for men's wear at Louis Vuitton, which he's held for the past five years, is the paycheck that lets him indulge his wanderlust. That doesn't mean he phones it in, any more than that his travels are part of a fashion thematic. They define him, as a human and as a designer. His restless spirit and eye inform what he brings to the workroom. And so the many journeys he has made over the past year to Africa ("It's an easy flight and it's on the same time zone," he said backstage before his show on Friday, held in the sculpture garden of the Palais Royal. "I can go to South Africa for a weekend.") logically informed a collection that fused the spirit of the Punk clothes and memorabilia Mr. Jones avidly collects with motifs from both traditional black African cultures and the hybridized multiracial urban one so vividly evident in contemporary Cape Town. On paper, those elements would not be obvious choices for goods produced for a global luxury good behemoth. Yet Mr. Jones's success at the house he has produced one unexpected hit collection after another; notably that based on designs of the obscure British designer Christopher Nemeth requires a workmanlike understanding of the brief. A Vuitton customer in Dallas or Kuala Lumpur has no particular need to know that the fine lightweight mohair sweaters in the show, patterned like the skins of zebra, giraffe, hartebeest or nyala, were woven with technical yarn and knit on machines so expensive that few exist. And he may not get the references intrinsic to accessories like dog collars, D rings, kinky rubber raincoats (shades of Sex, the King's Road shop run by Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren). The designs sell themselves, no back story needed. True, it might enrich one's understanding of the covetable bags (the mainstay of a house founded as purveyor of luggage) to know that the drawings adorning them are adaptations by the artists Jake and Dinos Chapman of early Dutch etchings that Mr. Jones found at a shop near Boulders Beach on one of his South African trips. Then again, maybe not. Of course, there are things of outright ugliness; there often are at Vuitton. A trench coat in what appeared to be albino crocodile seemed designed exclusively for a Bond villain, the bag of obscene looking ostrich skin perhaps a place to stow his golden gun. At this end of the market, "exotics" are expected. As Mr. Jones has pointed out in the past, there's an oligarch out there for every astronomically priced specialty item. He cranks them out dutifully and shifts his attention to more compelling aspects of design, like finding ways subtly to introduce Punk tartans and patterns derived from Masai blankets into a collection whose shapes are otherwise safely restricted: narrow cut trousers, shorts, safari jackets, sleeveless sweaters, heavy soled sandals and lots of bags. Then he launches it all onto the runway, dashes home to collect his bags and heads for the airport. Andrea Incontri is another of the unsung and gifted journeyman designers now at work (one is tempted here to cite, too, Maria Grazia Chiuri, the untemperamental Valentino designer who reportedly is to be tapped as the first woman designer at Dior). For the past several years Mr. Incontri, a trained architect, has been producing men's wear for Tod's, the family owned Italian leather goods house based in that country's Marche region and best known for its gommino shoes. Tod's presentation, held last week in a pavilion set up over the tennis court at the Villa Necchi Campiglio in Milan, involved a series of tableaux vivants reminiscent of the images of elegant locals, mainly nobles, photographed for "Italian Portraits," a volume commissioned some years ago by Diego della Valle, chairman and owner of Tod's Group. Translated, those images embodied the aspirational consumer whom Tod's as a brand lays claim to, and for whom Mr. Incontri implicitly designs. He interprets the casual way rich Italians of a certain social stratum wear costly things by making pricey sportswear that looks vaguely offhand. Perfectos, field jackets, bombers with low slung bellows patch pockets, linen shirts in abstracted leaf patterns, neatly pleated trousers and driving shoes, of course they all have the quality of something you probably already have in your closet or should. That is, if you are the type of person who actually wears driving shoes and not a pair of ratty Vans to drive down to the hardware store. About a million universes away from the cozy manly lairs that Tod's created in Milan were the scuzzy corridors and cabins in a gay bathhouse in the Marais neighborhood of Paris where Hood by Air chose to stage its latest presentation Friday afternoon. Though a sign over the door called the place a hammam, a kind of communal bathhouse common in Islamic countries, the actuality was a little closer to one's idea of purgatory. Dimly lighted, labyrinthine, reeking of Clorox and other odors, the place was no deterrent to the determined fashion flock, which turned out in force crowding stairs, corridors hung with condom dispensers and dank cabins in each of which a plasticized mattress occupies most of the floor. And they waited, and then waited some more, as techno pounded at earsplitting volume until, eventually, the lights flickered. A man with a luxuriant weave, wearing stiletto heels and a miner's lamp, came pacing through, soon followed by a series of the lunar complexioned models everyone seems to be casting lately. (Note: The whole season could use a shot of B12.) Apparently the models had been given instructions to stalk the halls of the bathhouse, somewhat in the manner of "sex hunters" in a John Rechy novel. This they did with zombie relish. And it can't have been easy on them, given the stifling heat, the smell, the patent leather stiletto thigh high boots; the pink shorts suits accessorized with arm slings; the one arm shirt dresses (on men) adorned with harness straps; the rugby striped sweaters with sleeves that hung to the ground; the floor length cloaks printed with the words "Dead Inside." Silly as it was in a way, the Hood by Air show was also bracing, renegade in a way that felt legitimate, not secondhand or referential actually, kind of Punk. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
"The only Jewish relative I have is my aunt," Max Czollek said. "My father died when I was young. The thread is extremely thin. Sometimes I think the things I do are to reconnect with that thread." Max Czollek, whose first nonfiction book is a rebuttal to calls for integration, believes that his country must face its history with more honesty and that those who are singled out shouldn't try to fit in. ESSEN, Germany Growing up in the 1990s in Berlin, the writer Max Czollek remembers, he and classmates occasionally unearthed human bones when they were playing outside their school. Years later, he learned that the site had been used as a deportation center during the Holocaust. "This was a place where Nazis gathered Jews and tortured them," he said. From there, he came to realize that Germany is, as he put it, "a huge graveyard." The continuing influence of the past on the present and what Czollek sees as Germany's collective reluctance to acknowledge it informs his latest book, "Desintegriert Euch" ("De integrate Yourselves"), a collection of politically charged essays and historical reflections that came out in August 2018 and is still making waves in the country. In it, he argues that Germany, eager to shed its past, isn't reckoning with the rise of anti Semitism, xenophobia and racism. And with the book's title, he is calling on people who have been ostracized or singled out to stop trying to fit in and embrace their "otherness" so Germany can become a truly multicultural, pluralistic society. More than a year after its publication, "Desintegriert Euch" is in its seventh print run. And in a Germany grappling with national identity 75 years after the end of World War II, Czollek, 32, isn't anywhere near done talking about anti Semitism. But the book's fans are by no means limited to those who are Jewish. Last fall, in Essen, Czollek spoke at a panel exploring what it is like to be "different in Germany," whether that means being black, having a Lebanese name or having a parent from India. At a nearby coffee shop after the panel, Czollek explained how the weight of the past motivates him. "I am one of the few Jews that has a history in Germany from before the Second World War," he said. His grandfather survived more than one concentration camp and spent several years in exile in China before returning to East Germany in the late 1940s. "The only Jewish relative I have is my aunt," Czollek said. "My father died when I was young. The thread is extremely thin. Sometimes I think the things I do are to reconnect with that thread." Want to keep up with the latest and greatest in books? This is a good place to start. None Learn what you should be reading this fall: Our collection of reviews on books coming out this season includes biographies, novels, memoirs and more. See what's new in October: Among this month's new titles are novels by Jonathan Franzen, a history of Black cinema and a biography by Katie Couric. Nominate a book: The New York Times Book Review has just turned 125. That got us wondering: What is the best book that was published during that time? Listen to our podcast: Featuring conversations with leading figures in the literary world, from Colson Whitehead to Leila Slimani, the Book Review Podcast helps you delve deeper into your favorite books. Czollek, who has a Ph.D. from the Center for Anti Semitism Research at the Technical University of Berlin, has also written several volumes of poetry, one of which went on sale in September, and is a co editor of "Jalta," a twice yearly journal on contemporary Jewish culture, which published its first special edition in conjunction with the Jewish Literary Festival. Translations of some of Czollek's poems are online, though none of his books have been fully translated into English. The European Jewish Congress estimates that about 200,000 Jews live in Germany today, but most migrated to the country from the former Soviet Union after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Czollek's generation of German Jews those who are millennials today were some of the first who could attend Jewish schools from first grade through high school. Having Jewish spaces in which to form critical ideas, he said, "is a prerequisite for thoughts like de integration to emerge." In postwar Germany, national identity has in many ways been defined by "overcoming the past," or the effort to move beyond the crimes and ideology of the Nazis. "Germany is a country that prides itself on being a world master of memory culture," said Jon Cho Polizzi, a doctoral candidate in the German department at the University of California at Berkeley, who has translated four chapters of Czollek's book as well as some of his poetry and essays into English. "That's as German as a soft pretzel." The historian Michael Brenner has said in lectures that it was crucial that Jews were seen as integrated as West and East Germany emerged in the years after the war. "The presence of Jews served as a litmus test for the new democracies," he said. In his book, Czollek deals with how that litmus test has evolved and what it means for a Jew in Germany today. Making use of a term coined in 1996 by the sociologist Y. Michal Bodemann, "the theater of memory," Czollek writes that Jewish people in Germany are "a confirmation of the German narrative of not being Nazi anymore." Unfortunately, he adds, this setup means that "Germans have fundamentally misunderstood their responsibility for the past," something that has become increasingly clear with the rise of the far right Alternative for Germany party, known as the AfD, and growing anti Semitism (an attempted attack on a synagogue in Halle has been the most violent example). "He really hit a nerve with this criticism," said Mirjam Wenzel, the director of the Jewish Museum in Frankfurt. Though Wenzel said "Desintegriert Euch" is important, she has called its sometimes aggressive tone "battle rap," saying it doesn't offer an inclusive vision of Germany. "What is this society meant to be?" she said. "In his book, that question is not there. It has no interest in what holds people together. Either you're part of my crowd and my way of thinking or you're not." "It feels like I wrote this book standing on a stage," Czollek said. "This allowed me to be more extreme and more theatrical in a way than I would not have been coming from a Ph.D." 'The threat from the right has created a new kind of solidarity' Though Czollek writes from the perspective of a German Jew, in the book and in all of the lectures and panels that have followed, he has sought to create alliances with other minority groups. Integration has become a buzzword in Germany, gaining traction after more than a million asylum seekers began arriving in 2015. From one point of view, the word encourages newcomers to join German society and build their lives here with existing templates as a guide. From another, it imposes conformity on the quarter of the country with immigrant backgrounds. "Integration is based on certain ideas of how society works there's a certain German dominant position," Czollek said. "'We were here first, you were here last, and this is why you have to adapt.'" The problems arise when the perspectives offered by the new arrivals are disregarded because they do not fit in with German expectations. She sees the success of Czollek's book as a positive change in German society. "For a long time, nobody wanted to hear about anything race related," she said. "There is this thinking that race is a construct, so there can't be any racism. That was the end of the discussion. Racists are Nazis and we're not Nazis." But now, Sanyal said, "there's a new kind of self confidence in the so called immigrant community, if you want to stick a label on it. People who are supposed to be outside of the culture are now part of it." For Czollek, writing and talking about the book has been part of a lifelong effort to maintain the thread with his ancestors. "I feel like I'm in a constant discourse with them," he said. "The only difference is I'm the one who lives." Follow New York Times Books on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, sign up for our newsletter or our literary calendar. And listen to us on the Book Review podcast. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
The Supreme Court decision last week protecting the DACA program was reason for celebration, but the Trump administration's assault on immigration isn't over. President Trump has already said he plans to keep pushing to end DACA. But more immediately, under the guise of the pandemic, the Trump administration is turning back unaccompanied children at the border in violation of federal law. In October 2017 the White House issued a wish list of immigration policies it wanted to carry out. First on the list was building the border wall. No. 2 was deporting children who were traveling on their own. That is quietly happening right now, with public health as the excuse. Last week, the Centers for Disease Control indefinitely extended an order barring the entry of migrants seeking protection at land borders, including children. This order, first issued in March, flouts the federal anti trafficking law that requires the government to place unaccompanied children into protective custody and allow them to go before an asylum officer or judge. So far, Border Patrol agents, who have not been trained on how to ask for or evaluate testimony, have turned back more than 2,000 children, either sending them back over the bridge to Mexico, or putting them on Immigration and Customs Enforcement flights back to their home country. Children, many of them younger than 13, come to the United States from all over the world seeking safety. Our anti trafficking law requires that, once the Border Patrol apprehends a child, they must be transferred to the care and custody of the Office of Refugee Resettlement, and placed in a shelter where they can recover enough to tell their story, have the opportunity to ask for protection, and be placed with family members in the United States while they go through immigration proceedings. Our government is returning children targeted by gangs right back to their tormentors, abused children to their abusers. I've worked with unaccompanied children for 16 years. It takes time to unravel these children's stories, to figure out what, if anything they have to return to. Once, my group was assigned to work with a 16 year old girl from Haiti who was pregnant. One of our French speaking volunteers met with her for months before she felt comfortable enough to share her story about walking home from school one day and being grabbed and blindfolded by a gang of men who raped her. She became pregnant as a result and felt so ashamed that it took her months to talk about it with her volunteer advocate. In another case, a teenage boy from Guatemala, who spoke an indigenous language and understood very little Spanish, was brought to the United States by a coyote. He was placed in protective custody and was assigned a child advocate. It took nearly a year for the advocate to determine that he had been forced to work in cornfields for six days a week, from sunup to sundown. He wasn't allowed to attend school. His advocate made the case that it was not in his best interests to be sent back. He was granted asylum and is now enrolled in community college. Another priority on the administration's 2017 wish list was to get rid of the Flores settlement agreement, a 1997 consent decree that prevents the Department of Homeland Security from holding children in family detention for more than 20 days. While the Trump administration has tried to get around the Flores agreement, the federal courts have thwarted those efforts. But top agency officials have reinstated a plan called "binary choice." Homeland Security told parents in family detention that if they're worried about the coronavirus, they could sign paperwork to get their children released. Parents face the torturous "choice" of keeping their children indefinitely detained in conditions that one federal court has described as "hotbeds for contagion" or being separated from them. It's family separation redux. During the pandemic, we've all been required to accept significant limits on our day to day life to protect ourselves, to protect our communities. But that's not a reason to turn away children, especially children desperately in need of protection. As was recently pointed out by public health experts, there are steps we can take to reduce the health risks for immigrant children who arrive at the border on their own, while protecting Americans. Shelters run by the Department of Health and Human Services' Office of Refugee Resettlement are nearly empty there is plenty of room to quarantine children for 14 days. The child welfare laws of all 50 states require that before a child is placed with family, or sent across state lines, a judge must consider whether the child will be safe. That requirement doesn't disappear because there's a pandemic. Unaccompanied immigrant children deserve no less we have an obligation, under federal and international law, to learn their stories and make sure the next place they land they'll be safe. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Opinion |
And so it goes as our heroes eat and joke, drive to the city of Assos, hop a boat to Lesbos and so on, as Monday gives way to Tuesday. To liven things up visually, Winterbottom throws in pretty as a postcard shots, some captured with drones, natch, and adds some unconvincing narrative shadows, folding in a family illness for one of the men and a glance at the Syrian refugee crisis. It's pleasantly innocuous at first riding shotgun with these two but I found myself progressively irritated by their lack of curiosity about the places they visit. The "Trip" movies have always been self aware about their own weightlessness, wringing laughs by needling the men and their vanity. That's as smart as it is convenient; this time, though, it also feels like a cop out. Some of my impatience has to do with the pandemic and my wistfulness about the places I've been and those I yearn to visit. And this movie, the final one in the series, just isn't as funny as the others. The larger problem, though, is that by trying to give "The Trip to Greece" some heft, Winterbottom only draws attention to the series' lack of interest in history, other people, the politics of global tourism and, well, the world. Coogan and Brydon have racked up a lot of miles but to watch them indifferently eat yet another generic haute cuisine meal in yet another interchangeable restaurant is to realize they never really left home, which might be the point but is also a bummer. Not rated. Running time: 1 hour 50 minutes. Rent or buy on Amazon, iTunes and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
Ben Lupo, also known as Dr. Lupo. "I feel like I've been preparing for this moment my whole life," he said.Credit...Vincent Tullo for The New York Times Is This the Most Virus Proof Job in the World? Ben Lupo, also known as Dr. Lupo. "I feel like I've been preparing for this moment my whole life," he said. Ben Lupo sat in his basement in Omaha one recent afternoon, trying to kill a brigade of heavily armed Russians before they killed him. "I'm getting shot at already, dog," he said into a headset, as the sound of machine guns echoed in the air. "So, this is not cool." Moments later, the Russians had cornered and finished him off also not cool. It was a grisly end to an ill fated campaign in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, a first person shooter video game set in the fictional country of Urzikstan. Mr. Lupo did not stew over his demise. He didn't have time. About 13,000 people were watching him live on Twitch, the streaming platform where hordes of fans can pay to follow the best online gamers in the business. Few attract bigger crowds than Mr. Lupo, and since the coronavirus began forcing people to shelter in place, his crowds have only grown. He estimates that his viewership is up 25 to 30 percent. "I feel," he said in an interview, "like I've been preparing for this moment my whole life." It's hard to think of a job title more pandemic proof than "superstar live streamer." While the coronavirus has upended the working lives of hundreds of millions of people, Dr. Lupo, as he's known to acolytes, has a basically unaltered routine. He has the same seven second commute down a flight of stairs. He sits in the same seat, before the same configuration of lights, cameras and monitors. He keeps the same marathon hours, starting every morning at 8. Social distancing? He's been doing that since he went pro, three years ago. For 11 hours a day, six days a week, he sits alone, hunting and being hunted on games like Call of Duty and Fortnite. With offline spectator sports canceled, he and other well known gamers currently offer one of the only live contests that meet the standards of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Viewership numbers on Twitch leapt 31 percent from March 8 to March 22, according to Arsenal.gg, a data analytics firm. (By then, one in four Americans was under shelter in place orders.) During that two week span, the numbers of hours a day watched on Twitch rose to 43 million from 33 million. "Live streaming and online video games are the only sports we can watch, right?" said Doron Nir, the chief executive of StreamElements, a company that provides tools and services to streamers. "This is a huge moment of validation." All four of these giants have embraced the same strategy that keeps LeBron James in Nike sneakers: sign superstars to huge, exclusive contracts. Here are more fascinating tales you can't help but read all the way to the end. None Getting Personal With Iman. The supermodel talks about life after David Bowie, their Catskills refuge and the perfume inspired by their love. A Resilient Team for a Broken Nation. With the Taliban in control, what, and whom, is Afghanistan's national soccer team playing for? The Fight of This Old Boxer's Life Was With His Own Family. A battle among Marvin Stein's family over his fortune broke out, and he suddenly found himself powerless to fight for himself. "You've got the biggest tech companies in the world competing for the top talent to stream exclusively on their platform," said Rod Breslau, who helped start the e sports section of ESPN's site. "That gives the talent agency that works for a guy like Lupo a huge amount of leverage to negotiate." In December, Mr. Breslau said, Twitch signed Mr. Lupo and two other streaming stars to multiyear deals worth millions. It was a counterattack of sorts. Over the summer, Tyler Blevins, who plays under the name Ninja and is widely considered one of the best Fortnite players in the world, left Twitch for Mixer in a multiyear deal reportedly worth as much as 30 million. These are sums that may startle the uninitiated. But Mr. Lupo and Mr. Blevins are celebrities in a gaming industry that generates more than 150 billion a year in revenue, according to Newzoo, a gaming analytics company more than double the global film and music industries combined. Marquee professional athletes from the worlds of basketball, baseball and football are about to jump into this fray. Josh Swartz, an executive at Popdog, which owns a talent agency for gamers, said he is preparing deals on behalf of stars of Major League Baseball, the National Basketball Association and the National Football League, many of whom are part time gamers. "My phone is ringing off the hook with sports agents saying, 'My guy plays Call of Duty,' or 'My guy plays Fortnite.'" he said. "These athletes are just stuck at home. In a lot of cases, they are going to end up with their own streaming channel," watched by thousands of fans eager to interact with their heroes. Mr. Lupo says he rose to the top of the crowded, highly competitive live gaming pile through luck. Five years ago, he was an information technology specialist at an insurance company and started live streaming part time on a game called Destiny. At first, eight people watched, but the audience grew quickly. Mr. Lupo has top notch skills, the warm, authoritative voice of a drive time radio D.J. and a gift for wry wit, even when mortally wounded. "Why would I need to practice?" he asked viewers, after losing that Call of Duty game. "I'm a god. I'm insane. Look at my body, dude." What truly launched Mr. Lupo was a perfectly tossed virtual grenade. He lobbed it at Mr. Blevins while the two faced off in a first person shooter called PUBG. A video of the encounter shows a stupefied look on Mr. Blevins's face, displayed in a corner of the screen, which gradually segues into laughter and delight, as the death of his avatar sinks in. "We hit it off immediately," said Mr. Lupo. "We were like brothers, and people liked watching that friendship grow." Around this time, Fortnite made its debut and became a cultural phenomenon. Mr. Lupo and Mr. Blevins started teaming up to play against others. (Each game starts with 100 players). Mr. Blevins later asked Mr. Lupo to serve as a play by play commentator during a Fortnite event at the Luxor Resort and Casino in Vegas. Mr. Lupo spends each day with an overhead camera pointed at his hands, another camera pointed at the side of his face and a display of what he sees on the screen. Most of the time, he controls an avatar who is both running for his life and in the midst of a frantic killing spree. He and his online teammates he usually has a few, whom he talks to through a headset scramble at breakneck speed, defusing bombs, sniping at enemies and hurtling over landscapes in hijacked trucks. It seems the opposite of relaxing. Mr. Lupo's fan base is riveted. It skews older than the average Twitch gaming channel. He is married his wife, Samantha, is his manager and has a 4 year old son. His biggest supporters tend to hail from a similar demographic. "He became a dad a couple months after I did," said Nick Kallner, 34, who lives near Albany and has been watching Mr. Lupo since his Destiny days. "I have the sense watching him that he's a dad like me, a real world guy. Plus, he's funny." And while Mr. Lupo is fluent in the language of bro speak, his devotees include plenty of women. "What cemented it for me is how he built a respectful community," said Lindsey Hladik, who lives in Orlando, Fla. "As a woman, you get a lot of harassment, people casually throwing off offensive terms, and he's always good about shutting down that kind of behavior." Ms. Hladik, 34, is a manager at an e commerce site and has been working from home for the last three weeks. Mr. Lupo's channel plays in the background, all day, every day. "It's like having the TV on," she said. The difference is that the star of this show performs for hours on end. Keeping energy levels up is just one of Mr. Lupo's challenges. On a few occasions over the years, pranksters have sicced the police on him, calling the authorities and claiming that some horrible crime was unfolding at his house a toxic gag known as "swatting." That has made it uncomfortable when fans knock on his door to introduce themselves. In the moment, Mr. Lupo can't help but imagine worst case scenarios. Even when there's just peace and quiet, he spends most of his waking hours in a windowless room. It would be a grim existence, he said, if he didn't love video games and performing before an audience that keeps growing. "People are finding ways to distract themselves a bit from what's going on in the outside world," he said. "If I'm helping, that's fantastic." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
In the glory days of Lillian Randolph's down on its luck plantation, long before war broke out and the family fortune disappeared, Robert E. Lee was a guest in her very house. "He was always a gentleman," her frail old servant Furs reminisces, and when he pictures Lee standing in the elegant room, we envision him there as well. "He danced the Virginia reel with Miss Lillian at her debutante ball." This is how close the layers of history feel in "The Plantation," a startlingly visceral immersive adaptation of Anton Chekhov's "The Cherry Orchard," set in post bellum Virginia and performed in the gracefully colonnaded Commanding Officer's House on Governors Island, with a humor and humanity that would surely please Chekhov. The comedy he insisted was in his play is alive and well in "The Plantation." But it's also a production, long in development, that's arrived just at the moment we need it. Adapted and directed by Claire Beckman for the Brooklyn based Brave New World Repertory Theater, "The Plantation" is an examination of race and the legacy of slavery that feels urgently relevant in the wake of the violence last month in Charlottesville, Va. Set in 1870, in the aftermath of emancipation, it's a play whose notions of tradition and inheritance and ownership of property rights that included the rights to human bodies have far deeper reverberations than they usually do in "The Cherry Orchard." Black or white, the characters here are our forebears. We can see the resemblance, passed down through generations of the American family, and it isn't always flattering. Chekhov's freed serfs have been transformed into freed slaves, like Furs (Arthur French), who stayed where he was when emancipation came. Devoted to Lillian (Alice Barrett Mitchell), a spoiled creature who is devoted foremost to herself, he prefers the old ways, and so does she with a stubbornness that may kill them both. She has a houseful of servants she can no longer afford to feed, and a plantation headed for the auction block, yet she clings to the tattered romance of her poisonous, prosperous past. Her neighbor Alan Lopa (a moving Craig A. Grant), who has a head for business and the money to prove it, suggests a way she could save the plantation: cut down the magnolia trees, build some vacation cottages on the land. But he is a black man, the son of a slave. Even if it means losing the place she loves most in the world, she is not about to listen to him. Skip this paragraph if you don't know the ending to "The Cherry Orchard," which Ms. Beckman keeps to powerful effect: ancient Furs, forgotten and abandoned in an empty house. At the Commanding Officer's House, the poignancy of this gains a frisson of history the ghosts of our American past that we keep trying to leave behind, and that painfully haunt us still. The inaugural Corkscrew festival, which ended last weekend in the East Village, did its little bit to fill the FringeNYC void with five world premiere shows and a reading series at the Paradise Factory, a space the fringe festival has used in recent years. The one play I saw, Ms. Casey's "False Stars," was very much in keeping with that independent, shoestring budget spirit. Directed by Jenny Reed and set in the academic enclave of Oxford, Miss., it's a story of homecoming and coming out, of brilliant mentorship and bad fatherhood, of cutthroat competition for both love and professorship. It is, in other words, ambitious yet overstuffed to the point of unwieldiness. Still, the production was packed with young talent, most notably Jules Forsberg Lary as Peg, protege of the brilliant neuroscientist whose illness has drawn a motley group together, and the charismatic Jonathan Iglesias as Victor, a loyal friend to the great man's child. In the risk taking venture that is summer festival going, encountering talent you want to see more of is a worthy payoff. A play with a name like Mr. Kuritzkes's new one, the deeply strange and strangely riveting " hole," would also seem to be rather a niche affair. Its one word title, too crude to make it past the editors intact, goes a long way toward describing the show, about a doctor overwhelmingly fixated on his own anus and what comes out of it. Directed and designed by Knud Adams, this is a frequently comic, graphically foul, progressively unsettling story of one man's self obsession and self harm, interwoven with an almost unwitting confession of the grave damage he's doing as a physician. In his mind, of course, he is a beneficent healer, bestowing his gifts on a grateful world that rewards him lavishly. The play is a monologue, which Mr. Adams has smartly double cast with actors who speak different passages of the text an approach that heightens the production's already pitched surreality but also the implication that this reckless, narcissistic disaster of a human being is in some ways us. On a gleaming metallic set whose silvery serpentine backdrop suggests a digestive tract (and whose light brown shag rug suggests, well, eww), Ikechukwu Ufomadu plays the fetishistic doctor with the shame free self satisfaction of a well practiced talk show guest. Polly Lee's version is British and proper and somewhat more horrified as events in the doctor's work (he has lately been force feeding prisoners at the behest of the government) and in his own body become ever more alarming. Both actors wear headsets throughout the performance, which Mr. Adams told me is its own kind of force feeding: They're listening to a speeded up recording of their lines, which come at them faster than is comfortable. The pace of the show is consequently headlong, with just the barest pauses as the doctor glides from one strange narrative strand to the next. " hole" is go for broke weird, the kind of play that leaves even a friendly audience, like the one I saw it with, a little stunned at the end. Is it brutal, discomfiting and truly gross? Absolutely. But in a production this spot on, that's not a bad thing at all. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
Shana Claudio left the bar on the Upper East Side of Manhattan for her third Tinder date of the day. She had already met a finance type for brunch that Sunday in October 2013 through the dating app (he was a bit superficial), and she found the second guy, whom she met for a drink, forgettable. By now it was early evening, and Ms. Claudio, who now works in corporate communications, was scheduled to go on a date at a nearby bar with a guy named Ken. He turned out to be Ken Andrews, a 33 year old surgeon in his fourth year of medical residency at N.Y.U., who thought Ms. Claudio was a "total knockout." After three hours of conversation, Mr. Andrews walked her home, giving her a quick kiss at her apartment doorstep. "No way was he coming upstairs and he didn't try that's not why I was on Tinder," said Ms. Claudio, now 33. They went out again, and they were engaged 10 months later. She is now Mrs. Andrews. Yes, they swiped right and met the one with hardly a cheap rendezvous in sight, even though Tinder, the ubiquitous mobile dating app, has been written off by some observers as nothing more than a vehicle to promote quick and easy hookups. In a 2015 article in Vanity Fair, Nancy Jo Sales argued that Tinder is responsible for a "dating apocalypse," with several 20 something New York men admitting they use it to prowl for women to sleep with. They call their conquests "Tinderellas" and pride themselves on getting women into bed after a few texts. The article set off a firestorm on the Twittersphere, with Tinder going on the defense at one point tweeting out 30 responses in just a few minutes. Tinder acknowledged that some users just want to hook up, but said that a vast majority were looking for meaningful connections Tinder users can swipe right if they think someone is attractive, or swipe left if they don't. And if the right swiped person approves, then the duo has the ability to message, and perhaps get to know each other. There's no lengthy profile. On Tinder, users see nothing but a photo, a short tagline, someone's profession and perhaps an alma mater. It's why the app is sometimes called shallow: You're pretty much judging someone on their picture alone. But despite its critics, the app has catapulted to the top of the dating scene in places around the country, from Miami to Manhattan, thanks to its ease of use. You sign up, you swipe, you maybe land a date. And what may surprise some cynics is that Tinder is also landing spouses for more than a few of its users, including a number who have been featured in the Vows section of The New York Times. "Three years ago, Tinder was considered a hookup app," said Julie Spira, an online and mobile dating coach based in Los Angeles, who advises her clients to go on three dating sites, including Tinder, if they're serious about meeting someone. "Now people are joining Tinder because it's efficient and easy to use, and everyone seems to be on it." Thanks to Tinder's lowbrow reputation, some couples have lied to friends and family members about how they met. Mrs. Andrews admits that she and her husband told people they met at a bar when they first started dating. "We worried they wouldn't take us as seriously," she said. When she took Mr. George, who works in advertising, to a college basketball game with her parents, her father asked him, "You're not one of those Tinder boys, are you?" Mr. George shook his head no. (They came clean a few weeks later, and it became a running joke that Mr. George had lied to his father in law the first time they met.) Still, the app has become so popular that couples are shedding some of the shame associated with meeting on it. Many are proudly incorporating Tinder into their engagement or wedding ceremonies. A spokesman for Tinder said that the company has received wedding invitations via email and regular mail, and that Sean Rad, the chief executive, and other members of the Tinder team are often asked if they would like to attend. One couple were engaged using Tinder messages. Rachael Honowitz, 35, lived in Manhattan for 12 years, working as an event planner for People magazine, before deciding to move to Los Angeles in 2014. She moved with the hope that men on the West Coast weren't as noncommittal as the ones she met in New York. She met her husband, Jason Cosgrove, a digital media executive who was growing tired of the online dating scene, on Tinder six weeks later. "I was probably chatting with 10 guys at the time," said Ms. Honowitz, who now runs a company that prepares gift bags for award shows and celebrities. "I was even talking to one of his best friends, which was a bit awkward later." Mr. Cosgrove, 38, decided to propose using Tinder messages while sitting with Ms. Honowitz on a bench in Central Park during a trip to New York. When he ran into technical difficulties on Tinder (they couldn't get their profiles to "match" in a different city), he sent his "Tinder message" via text, excerpted here: "Here we are. Back in the place where it all began a little app inside your phone. But things have changed a bit since we first met here ... I suppose after saying some sweet stuff to a girl on Tinder, it would be time to ask her out. ... But I've got another question instead." Ms. Honowitz put the phone down; Mr. Cosgrove got down on one knee and proposed. "I was embarrassed by how we met at first and didn't tell people, but now I see it as my civic duty to let people know," said Ms. Honowitz, who agreed to let Tinder post their love story on the "success stories" part of their website. "There's no shame in meeting on Tinder. I'm a smart, educated girl from a great family. Jason is, too." In 2015, Eric Schleicher posted a wedding photo of himself and his new wife, Caitlin, on Instagram with an attention grabbing "Straight Outta Tinder" graphic stamped on the front. "We SwipedRight!," Mr. Schleicher, the marketing manager for events at the BOK Center arena in Tulsa, Okla., captioned the photo. He's one of hundreds who have posted to the hashtag. "People are always surprised when I tell them how we met," he said. "I thought this was a fun way of sharing it." Mr. Schleicher joined Tinder in the fall of 2013, shortly after moving to Dallas. He wasn't looking for a hookup (he says that's not his thing). He just wanted to get to know people. Ms. Denaro signed up for a Tinder account at the same time as her best friend, and they'd both scroll through the guys, like it was a game. They were encouraged. "On Tinder, I felt like I'd found a larger pool of guys, guys I would have been friends with," she said. (There were definitely creepers, too, like the guy who asked if she liked massages, or the one who asked her to describe her feet.) When she met Rob Becker, she had an instant crush, but she didn't take him seriously at first. "I had written him off, thinking 'Come on, I'm not really going to meet my husband on Tinder,'" she said. But he was exactly her type, and they were engaged a year later. He gave her a T shirt that night: "Yeah, we met on Tinder," it read. And Ms. Denaro's best friend? She was engaged a month later to one of her Tinder beaus as well. Says Ms. Denaro: "We were in each other's bridal parties." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
Though she was just one of Jahangir's wives, she became his favorite and was often by his side as he traveled his empire. We know that she held a special position, unlike that of any other woman, because she issued royal decrees and coins were minted bearing her name, something done for sovereigns, not their wives. Her rise created tensions in the court and the royal family, which were documented by foreign envoys, who often wrote with disdain about Nur's influence over Jahangir and described him as an alcoholic. Britain's ambassador, Thomas Roe, concluded that Nur "governs him, and wynds him up at her pleasure." While filled with particulars, "Empress" can, at times, feel disjointed as Lal breezes over some of the larger developments and changes in Nur's life. While she dwells extensively on the milieu of the harem, she spends little time explaining what led Jahangir to elevate Nur above his other wives. The most we get is the assumption that Jahangir was impressed by Nur's generosity and good will and that she had added influence because her father and brother held important positions at court. Later Lal abruptly reveals that Nur concluded that Shah Jahan, a son of Jahangir by one of his other wives and widely considered the heir apparent, was a threat to her power, even though she had earlier written that Nur and Shah Jahan were getting on well. The failure to comment on the intervening period is an odd oversight, given that this familial rift would become very consequential when Shah Jahan rebelled against and succeeded his father. Lal is clearly constrained by the paucity of the material she has to work with. But she seems too reluctant to draw inferences and make analytical deductions. She might not be able to say definitely what transpired between Nur and Jahangir or Nur and Shah Jahan, but she could tell readers what she thinks is the most credible and plausible account. Still, Lal has done a service to readers interested in the Mughal period and the many forgotten or poorly remembered women of Indian history. She has helped shine a little light on an enigmatic character many think they know but few actually understand. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
Full reviews of recent dance performances: nytimes.com/dance. A searchable guide to these and other performances is at nytimes.com/events. Lauren Bakst and Yuri Masnyj (Thursday and next Friday) As part of the Drawing Center's multidisciplinary exhibition "Name It by Trying to Name It: Open Sessions 2014 15," Ms. Bakst, a dancer and choreographer, joins forces with Mr. Masnyj, a visual artist. In "Single Occupancy," they throw open the definition of "portraiture," using objects, a monitor and the human body to explore presence through absence. Thursday at 5 p.m., next Friday at 2 and 3 p.m., 35 Wooster Street, SoHo, 212 219 2166, drawingcenter.org. (Siobahn Burke) Ballet Festival (through Sunday) This festival of small and venturesome ballet troupes continues on Friday with new and revived works by Emery LeCrone, featuring dancers from City Ballet and American Ballet Theater. On Saturday and Sunday, Amy Seiwert and her contemporary ballet company, Imagery, make their Joyce Theater debut with three works featuring Ms. Seiwert's dramatic and sensuous movement, set to music by Max Richter, Jeff Buckley and Holcombe Waller. Friday and Saturday at 8 p.m., Sunday at 2 p.m., 175 Eighth Avenue, at 19th Street, Chelsea, 212 242 0800, joyce.org. (Burke and Brian Schaefer) Soledad Barrio and Noche Flamenca (through Saturday) There are many ways of retelling Sophocles' "Antigone," and thanks to this company, flamenco is now one of them. In "Antigona," the artistic director Martin Santangelo has adapted the Greek tragedy for 14 performers and four musicians, with choreography by the troupe's irrepressible star, Ms. Barrio. At 8:30 p.m., West Park Presbyterian Church, 165 West 86th Street, Manhattan, 866 811 4111, nocheflamenca.com. (Burke) Battery Dance Festival (Saturday through next Friday) On the water's edge at the southern tip of Manhattan, this free and popular annual event begins with the Erasing Borders Festival of Indian Dance to commemorate India's independence day. The program features five Indian dance artists, from here and abroad. Throughout the week at sunset, the Battery Dance Festival continues with companies from Norway, Colombia, Italy and Poland, as well as over a dozen local troupes, including Cornfield Dance and the host, Battery Dance Company. Saturday to Thursday at 6:30 p.m., Robert F. Wagner Jr. Park, Battery Park City, enter at Battery Place, Lower Manhattan; next Friday at 6 p.m., Michael Schimmel Center for the Arts, Pace University, 3 Spruce Street, between Park Row and Gold Street, Lower Manhattan, 212 219 3910, batterydance.org/festival. (Schaefer) Dance at Socrates (Saturday) Because dance is, in many ways, human sculpture in motion, it's very much at home in Socrates Sculpture Park. This annual dance series, produced by the arts organization Norte Maar, welcomes 10 companies throughout August to create new work at this East River waterfront park. Following weeklong residencies (which are open to the public), audiences are invited to witness the results. Week 2 artists are RudduR Dance, Gierre Godley, L K Dance and Jenni Hong Dance. (Continues on Aug. 22.) At 4 p.m., Long Island City, Queens, 718 956 1819, socratessculpturepark.org; free. (Schaefer) Brendan Drake Choreography (Tuesday through Aug. 23) The 1980 psychological thriller "Cruising," starring Al Pacino, was protested for its dark portrayal of gay leather bars. In "Rope," performed by four dancers, choreographer Brendan Drake explores stereotypes of gay men in pop culture from the aforementioned film to Hitchcock and Harry Potter using a postmodern dance vocabulary sprinkled with humor and camp. Tuesday through Aug. 22 at 8:30 p.m., Aug. 23 at 4 p.m., Here, 145 Avenue of the Americas, at Dominick Street, South Village, 866 811 4111, here.org. (Schaefer) Drive East (through Sunday) This festival of classical Indian dance and music, in its myriad forms, culminatesing this weekend with three performances each day. On Friday, the Stem Dance Kampni presents contemporary Indian dance, as does Aparna Sindhoor Dance Theater on Saturday. Also on Saturday, Kamala Reddy and Soumyra Rajupet present a Kuchipudi duet, and on Sunday, Janak Raj will perform solos in the expressive and sculptural style of Bharatanatyam. At various times, La MaMa Ellen Stewart Theater, 66 East Fourth Street, East Village, 212 564 4895, driveeastnyc.org. (Burke and Schaefer) FringeNYC (through Aug. 30) This annual collection of charmingly experimental, provocatively quirky and often hard to categorize performances includes a few dance related offerings. In "Diaghilesque!," the director choreographer Arrie Davidson honors (and skewers) the Ballets Russes legacy through a feminist and gay lens; Alex Perez's "Julian and Romero," sets Shakespeare's famous tragedy in 1960s Cuba with two men; "Succession" tells Valerie Green's life story through a series of solos; and "To Dance" is a musical opera about a dancer in Cold War Russia. At various dates, times and locations, fringenyc.org. (Schaefer) Jacob's Pillow Dance Festival (through Aug. 30) Sarasota Ballet continues its run through Sunday with works by Frederick Ashton, Christopher Wheeldon and the resident choreographer Ricardo Graziano in the Ted Shawn Theater, while the Quebecois flamenco troupe La Otra Orilla presents an evening length premiere with live music in the more intimate Doris Duke Theater. Beginning Wednesday, Benjamin Millepied's West Coast troupe L.A. Dance Project performs his work, as well as that of Justin Peck and the promising Israeli choreographer Roy Assaf. Also, the Liz Gerring Dance Company brings Ms. Gerring's cool, contemplative and critically acclaimed work "glacier." At various times, 358 George Carter Road, Becket, Mass., 413 243 0745, jacobspillow.org. (Burke and Schaefer) Martha Graham Dance Company (Wednesday) It's rare to peek behind the curtain of a classic dance work, but with its Graham Deconstructed studio series, the Martha Graham Dance Company invites audiences to inspect the modern dance matriarch's celebrated creations up close. Under the magnifying glass this time is "Embattled Garden," Graham's seductive 1958 take on the Adam and Eve tale. Graham dancers and artistic staff will chat about their process and the historical context of the work. At 7 p.m., Martha Graham Studio Theater, 55 Bethune Street, at Washington Street, West Village, 212 229 9200, Ext. 30, marthagraham.org. (Schaefer) SummerStage (through Aug. 23) With sights on Broadway in 2016, excerpts from "The Wiz" make a SummerStage appearance on Friday at Marcus Garvey Park (Madison Avenue and 122nd Street, East Harlem) to celebrate that beloved production's 40th anniversary. George Faison, the show's Tony Award winning choreographer, hosts the event. On Saturday and Sunday, also at Marcus Garvey Park, the contemporary circus collective Tinder Ash anchors an eclectic performance smorgasbord that includes Ephrat Asherie Dance, gymnasts and a marching band, among others. On Wednesday, in Central Park (Rumsey Playfield, midpark at 70th Street), dance, electronic music and interactive media converge with "Alt Mode," an exploration of what it means to be a woman on stage, from the creative team of Kate Watson Wallace and Christina McGeehan. The work shares a bill with Arch Dance Company and DJ King Britt. Friday at 8 p.m., Saturday, Sunday and Wednesday at 7 p.m., 212 360 2777, summerstage.org; free. (Schaefer) | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
One chilly November afternoon, my family and I had just finished hiking with some friends on Lancaster's rugged Conestoga Trail when we heard hooves approaching from behind. Two men on draft horses emerged from the trees, followed by a woman riding a spotted donkey the size of a pony. "Donkeys can do that?" asked my daughter Sophie, then 9, who'd barely managed to scramble up the slippery stone slope herself. "They love it," said the woman, our neighbor Tanya, swinging down out of the saddle and leading the donkey, Muffin, over for the kids to pet. "You know why miners always used donkeys instead of horses? Because donkeys are amazing in the mountains." Later, I'd realize that's when the first domino fell. We discovered Tanya lived just over the hill from us. Sophie began visiting her for lessons with Muffin. I mentioned to a neighboring farmer how odd it was to see a donkey out here in dairy country. A few months later, that farmer pulled into our driveway with a pitiful donkey he'd liberated from a church member with a hoarding problem. Sherman's first few days on our tiny Lancaster farm were touch and go as we waited to see if he'd survive his years of neglect. But once his damaged hooves began to heal and he was befriended by our gentlest goat, Lawrence, he soon settled in. He mingled with his new "herd," which consisted of a half dozen sheep, Lawrence and four other goats, and the newest stray in the household, an odd looking calico cat named Polly. He became so attached to Polly that, to her annoyance, he followed her whenever she entered the paddock. "So when is this race?" Tanya asked, after I'd told her about my idea of turning Sherman into a racing donkey and training him to run a pack burro race with me in Colorado. "Ha!" she snorted. "Well, I'm the one who told you to find him a job. But it won't be easy. Sherman can come up with a million ways to make your life a living hell. He's already two jumps ahead and you haven't even started. Before you decide, there's something you need to know about donkeys..." Sherman's brain, she explained, might be a bigger problem than his feet. Donkeys aren't like horses, which can be spurred into obedience. A donkey's reaction is the exact opposite; try to scare them and they'll freeze. "Their first instinct is to lock up," Tanya told me. "That's why they've got this reputation for being stubborn. If they sense danger or don't like the way they're being handled, they'll just turn to stone." Curtis Imrie, a veteran burro racer and expert trainer, was nearing the finish of a 15 mile race when his burro, Jackson, suddenly stopped in front of a wooden bridge. "Even though he'd crossed it, no problem, an hour earlier," Curtis said. He finally had to tie Jackson to the bridge, walk into town, and return with a winch equipped Jeep to pull the 750 pound animal across one crank at a time. For wild donkeys, going mannequin was a terrific survival adaptation. When motionless, burros are hard to spot and impossible to drive into ambush. True, they don't have a horse's raw speed, but when it comes to steadiness, stamina and heroic resistance to heat, cold and thirst, you can't do better than a burro. That's why famous adventurers and poor peasants alike made donkeys their ride of choice. Even Queen Victoria relied on donkeys to pull her carriage through narrow European streets when she traveled abroad. On our first day of race training, Tanya made sure to let Sherman know this was going to be fun. She loaded up a fanny pack with horse treats and gave his ears a good, long scratching so he'd always associate training with pleasure. "Here we go, Shermie," Tanya said. "Let's go party!" She strode off holding his lead rope, calm and assertive, and we went... Sherman dropped his butt and locked out his front legs. "Now we wait," Tanya said. She held the rope firmly but didn't pull, holding Sherman in an evenly matched tug of war. Gradually, Sherman stopped fidgeting. He took one step, then another, before suddenly walking all the way to us. "Good man!" Tanya crooned, feeding Sherman a handful of treats. She began walking again and this time Sherman followed, the rope hanging slack. But when we reached the road, Sherman recoiled as if it was a river of lava. "Maybe he's never seen asphalt before, maybe he thinks it's a bottomless lake, who knows?" Tanya said. "But with a donkey, anything you start you have to finish." She stepped into the road, looped the rope under her body and sat back on it while Sherman threw every fiber of his being into reverse. One of my neighbors rumbled past on his tractor, veering wide as Tanya smiled and waved, holding her ground in the middle of the road. Finally, Sherman placed one foot on the asphalt. "Sherminator!" Tanya crowed. "Good man. See? You trusted me and you didn't die." She fed him another fistful of treats and called it a day. "Whispering is the only way to go," Tanya said, referring to the technique of gently encouraging rather than bullying an animal. She led Sherman back to his buddy, Lawrence the goat, who had been patrolling the fence line nervously and watching us. "He's had enough tough times in his life." Tanya said she'd be back the next day to try a special plan, but that night I began working on one of my own: I tracked down a phone number for the iron man of burro racing himself, Hal Walter. I'd met Hal once before, but I'm not sure if he met me. We were introduced a few years earlier when I was in Leadville, Colo., to check out my first burro race. He shook my hand, grunted and walked away. Everything about him seemed tough as old leather. Like the time he caught a bad stomach bug a week before the first race in 2014. He was too sick to run, but had to drive up anyway because he'd promised to haul burros for two friends. Just before the starting gun, Hal decided to hop in anyway even though it was starting to sleet. He hadn't brought running clothes, so he borrowed a pair of shorts and slung on a barn coat. He and his burro trudged along in last place until, a few miles from the finish, they began working their way up through the pack. Soon, he was hard on the heels of Justin Mock, a 32 year old Denver runner who'd earned his own reputation for grit by finishing as the No.1 American in the 2010 London Marathon and, in the same year, breaking the Bolder Boulder 10K record for runners in gorilla costumes. Justin was lucky; his partner was Yukon Jack, a mammoth burro as eager and experienced as any human on the course. Together, Justin and Jack galloped into the final stretch. But whenever Justin looked over his shoulder, that crazy old guy in the flapping barn coat was still hot on his heels. Justin glanced back one more time, and the madman was gone. When he turned around, Hal was suddenly in the lead. Hal had waited for Justin to look left, then scooted right and shot ahead to win. He was 55 years old. The line went silent and stayed silent and I realized Hal was figuring out how to discourage me. Just sitting there, waiting for him to break the news, made it all clear to me. It was ridiculous to think that Sherman, who was still trying to master his own legs, and me, a rookie who'd have to lead him across trails at 13,000 feet, could pull this thing off in less than a year. Finally, Hal let me have it. "When can you get out here?" | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Well |
The man had recently traveled, including a brief stop in Tokyo. He had a fever and cough about a week ago, but was now feeling fine. He called the virtual medical line set up by Rush University Medical Center in Chicago recently to help screen patients for coronavirus. "He said all the right buzzwords: cough, fever, fatigue," said Dr. Meeta Shah, an emergency room physician at Rush. After talking with him, Dr. Shah did not think he needed to be admitted but referred him to the city's health department. Rush and other large hospitals across the country are quickly expanding the use of telemedicine to safely screen and treat patients for coronavirus, and to try to contain the spread of infection while offering remote services. "This is a kind of turning point for virtual health," Dr. Shah said. "We're actually seeing how it can be used in a public health crisis." While the notion of seeing a doctor via your computer or cellphone is hardly new, telemedicine has yet to take off widely in the United States. Health insurance plans do typically offer people the option of talking to a nurse or doctor online as an alternative to heading to an emergency room or urgent care center, but most people don't make use of it. Now doctors, hospital networks and clinics are rethinking how the technology can be used, to keep the worried well calm and away from clinical care while steering the most at risk to the proper treatment. "The use of telemedicine is going to be critical for management of this pandemic," said Dr. Stephen Parodi, an infectious disease specialist and executive with The Permanente Medical Group, the doctors' group associated with Kaiser Permanente, one of the leaders in the use of virtual visits for its patients. Telemedicine got an additional boost under the 8.3 billion emergency funding measure from Congress, which loosened restrictions on its use to treat people covered under the federal Medicare program. At a news conference on Monday, Seema Verma, the administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, praised the government's efforts to expand the use of telemedicine under Medicare, the federal program for people 65 and older. In a meeting on Tuesday at the White House with President Trump, private health insurers also said they would pay for the virtual visits for people who may have coronavirus to improve access to care for their customers. By using their phone or computer, patients will be able to get guidance about whether they need to be seen or tested instead of showing up unannounced at the emergency room or doctor's office. Patients, particularly those who would be at high risk for a serious illness if they were infected, can also opt to substitute a trip to a doctor's office with a virtual visit when it is a routine check in with a specialist or a primary care doctor. That way they can avoid crowded waiting rooms and potential infection. When Rush admitted a student last week who was believed to have the virus, the hospital was able to prepare for his arrival by clearing the ambulance bay of people and vehicles to protect patients and hospital staff from possible infection. Taken to an isolation room, he was examined by Dr. Paul Casey, an emergency room physician, and a nurse, both in protective gear. An infectious disease specialist was consulted over an iPad. The patient, who did have the virus, was released last Friday, and Rush was able to avoid the fate of other hospitals in the United States, where patients with Covid 19 led to the widespread quarantine of health care workers. "When the news of coronavirus broke last month, we saw the opportunity," Dr. Casey said. Health systems are racing to adapt and even develop virtual services that can serve as their front line for patients. "Telehealth is being rediscovered," said Dr. Peter Antall, the chief medical officer for AmWell, a company based in Boston that is working with health systems across the country. "Everybody recognizes this is an all hands on deck moment," he said. "We need to scale up wherever we can." Patients concerned about the coronavirus are being directed to NYU's virtual urgent care, which they can gain access to via their phone or a computer. "Our volumes are showing they are hearing that message loud and clear," said Dr. Paul A. Testa, an emergency medicine doctor who is the system's chief medical information officer. NYU is also encouraging its doctors who are self quarantined because of recent travel to see patients using video, as well as directing patients who are particularly vulnerable because of existing medical conditions to consider a virtual visit instead of heading to a doctor's office. But Dr. Testa emphasized that patients who need to be seen in person should not hesitate to seek care. "We're not discouraging anybody from coming in," he said. Virtual care has its limits, of course, and many of the start ups and others promoting their offerings may not be fully equipped to handle patients who might have the virus. At Zoom Care, a chain of clinics in Oregon and Washington, consumers are being encouraged to use the company's online chat feature so that their risks can be assessed. "We're being very explicit at Zoom Care that we can't test you for Covid 19," said Dr. Mark Zeitzer, who is the clinics' medical director of acute care services. Instead, people may be told to self quarantine and keep a careful eye on their symptoms. But the idea of using telemedicine to prevent further spread of the virus is being adopted quickly. At Intermountain Healthcare, the Utah system that cared for an infected patient at its Salt Lake City hospital, the concern over a potential measles outbreak last year led executives to consider how to better protect the community from infectious diseases. "When coronavirus hit the streets, we took the measles work flow and expanded on it," said Kerry Palakanis, a nurse practitioner who is the executive director of Intermountain's initiative, Connect Care. The system is also thinking about how it can use the same technology to deliver home health care, particularly for patients who are at high risk because of chronic medical conditions or have Covid 19 but can be treated safely at home. People at home could be equipped to take their blood pressure or test their blood sugars, and a doctor or nurse could be available over video. By monitoring more patients virtually, Intermountain will be able to limit the potential exposure of nurses who conduct home visits. "Those nurses are traveling out throughout the community," Dr. Palakanis said. Telemedicine companies say they are getting an increase in the number of calls, both from those who want to know more about what they can do to minimize their risk of catching coronavirus and those with worrisome symptoms. "We see the whole spectrum of patients," said Dr. Kristin Dean, medical director for Doctor On Demand, a company whose service is offered to customers of some of the major health insurance companies. In evaluating whether patients may be safely monitored at home, doctors take into account people's medical history and the severity of their symptoms, she said. "The patients have been appreciative of that switch," said Dr. Parodi of Permanente. "Many of them don't want to come in and be exposed in a clinic or office setting." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
Less than two weeks after Alen Ilic moved into the house he bought a block from the marina in Milford, Conn., he arrived home to find his mailbox filled with a fruit platter and an assortment of notes signed by his neighbors. "That pretty much sums up how people behave around here they're so welcoming," said Mr. Ilic, 46, who was also surprised by the friendly greetings he got while walking his dog, Kane something that rarely happened during the 20 years he rented in Woodside, Queens, before moving to Milford in early May. Now, he said, "It happens all the time. People say 'good morning,' and it's so nice." Like many others, he quickly discovered that simply by crossing into New Haven County, his savings would be substantial. "Milford is the first coastal town outside of Fairfield County, so the housing prices and taxes are much lower," said Barbara Zink, a real estate agent with Coldwell Banker, who grew up in Milford. Mr. Ilic, who wanted something with character, decided on a 1900 house that previous owners had converted from three bedrooms to two, with stained glass windows and built in cabinetry. He paid 230,000, and his annual property taxes are just over 4,000. The house is in the Devon neighborhood, close enough to the city's bustling downtown and to one of the many beaches that Mr. Ilic can walk to either spot in less than 30 minutes. Following a divorce, and nearing retirement after a 47 year nursing career, Ms. Aponte was ready for a change. So a year and a half ago, she left Westborough, Mass., for the Walnut Beach section of Milford, where her daughter had moved 11 years earlier. She bought a four bedroom house with a yard big enough to accommodate her nine grandchildren, paying 320,000. The home is a five minute drive from Walnut Beach, or a 12 minute walk to the three quarter mile boardwalk that connects Walnut Beach to Silver Sands State Park. "It's a pretty New England town that's just big enough, but not too big," said Ms. Aponte, 68, who attends the free summer concerts and weekly farmers market at Walnut Beach, and participates in programs at Milford's senior center and the local YMCA. She is also happy to be closer to New York City, and makes frequent train trips there, taking advantage of Metro North Railroad's senior discount. Now she is hoping to talk her sons into moving to Milford. "If any of my kids in Massachusetts were willing to move, I'd tell them to only consider Milford," Ms. Aponte said. Tucked beside the Housatonic River and hugging a long stretch of the Long Island Sound, Milford has a close relationship with the water. The beaches provide much of the city's social fabric during the summer, as do the boat filled marinas and busy harbor. Added to that are the many ponds, inlets and salt marshes, and a downtown waterfall that offers a picturesque backdrop for City Hall. 11 SMITHS POINT ROAD A three bedroom, two bathroom house on the water in a gated community, built in 1998 on 0.14 acres, listed for 898,500. 203 623 9844 Beyond the shoreline, this 23.6 square mile city extends north, bisected by I 95 and a highly commercial stretch of Boston Post Road, with several distinct neighborhoods and a highly varied housing stock. North of the Post Road are farmlands and two large housing developments built in the past 20 years, while the streets surrounding the downtown are lined with 19th century homes. Sprinkled throughout the city are the hundreds of Cape Cod style houses and split levels built in the 1950s for returning World War II vets, as well as a number of condominium complexes. 222 OLD FIELD LANE A four bedroom, two and a half bathroom renovated Cape Cod style house, built in 1951 on 0.21 acres, listed for 649,000. 203 590 0115 "It's amazing the different types of houses we have here in Milford. You can get something for 190,000 or 2.2 million, so there's something for everyone," said Ms. Zink, who grew up in a mobile home park owned by her family that once sat on the Post Road before moving in 2005 to make way for a Walmart. Now called Ryder Woods and under new ownership, the mobile park is home to about 200 families. Residents can age through Milford's various housing options without having to leave the city, said Stephanie Ellison, a broker associate with Re/Max Right Choice: "When people have kids, they want the larger properties in the north, with big yards. Then when the kids leave, they move to the beach, where there's a very social vibe and everybody knows everybody." 44 GOVERNORS AVENUE A Victorian house with three bedrooms, two bathrooms and carriage barn in back, built in 1860 on 0.71 acres, listed for 639,900. 203 243 2423 As of May 20, Ms. Zink said, there were 249 homes on the market in Milford: 201 single family houses, 37 condominiums and 11 multifamily properties. The most expensive was a 6,639 square foot waterfront house built in 2006, with four bedrooms and six bathrooms, listed for 2.075 million. The least expensive was a two bedroom, one bathroom, stationary mobile home in Ryder Woods, listed for 64,900, while the least expensive condominium was a one bedroom, one bathroom unit in South Wind Village, built in 1970 and listed for 129,900. The market has softened a bit this year: Through the end of April, the median sale price was 275,000, according to Coldwell Banker Area Reports, compared with 298,500 for the same four months in 2018. 114 CEDAR HILL ROAD A four bedroom, two bathroom upgraded Cape Cod style house, built in 1941 on 1.15 acres, listed for 445,000. 203 464 2598 Shops and restaurants line the mile long central green and spill into the harbor area, the site of the annual Milford Oyster Festival, which is held in mid August and features big musical acts and 30,000 oysters. (Milford was once a major oyster fishery.) Most of the beach communities have their own town centers and events, like the pie eating contest on Woodmont Day in late July. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
Owned and run by an American entrepreneur, Alissa Ruxin, the Retreat is the second of her two hotels in Kigali the first, Heaven Restaurant Boutique Hotel, is next door. The 11 room upscale property opened in late 2017 and emphasizes design, art and eco friendliness: the aesthetic of clean white exteriors and walls mixed with woods is contemporary African and pays homage to Rwanda. Photography and art from local artists hang in the public spaces and in the rooms, and there's a lush garden with indigenous plants and flowers such as banana and frangipani trees and birds of paradise . Rwandan builders custom made the furniture from sustainable Tanzanian teak wood, and the property is run entirely on solar energy. The Retreat, in the city's Kiyovu neighborhood, is on a leafy and peaceful residential street but is near the attractions of downtown Kigali including markets, malls and restaurants. Taxis are readily available, and the streets around the hotel are pedestrian friendly. The hotel offers two categories of rooms, a 400 square foot deluxe king and a 645 square foot superior king suite. All have private decks, high ceilings , floors constructed of sustainable bamboo wood and 48 inch flat screen televisions while the suites also have outdoor back terraces with daybeds and showers. My light flooded deluxe king room overlooked the hotel's outdoor walkway and had a comfortable teakwood king bed fitted with an organic handmade mattress from England, along with super soft white cotton sheets. Given the Retreat's small size and persona l service, I felt as though I was a guest at a friend's luxurious private home. I checked in close to midnight, following a nearly 24 hour journey from New York, and a staff of three was waiting to warmly greet me with freshly squeezed passion fruit juice and chilled towels. And although the hotel's restaurant was closed for the evening, one of the cooks was still on site and ready to whip me up a late dinner. My large, black tiled bathroom had double sinks and was stocked with slippers and a robe from Mitre Linen, a luxury brand from Britain, and toiletries from Cinnabar Green, a skin care line from Kenya that uses natural ingredients. The huge, walk in shower had a rain forest showerhead with strong water pressure. Let's just say that getting ready for the day was a pleasure. A room service menu is available, but eating in would be a shame when the hotel's all day restaurant serves memorably tasty dishes, using produce mainly grown in its gardens. Come sunset, the restaurant turns into a buzzy spot, where a four course prix fixe menu emphasizing Rwandan ingredients, for 75 a person, is the only option. Breakfast comes with a stay and includes a buffet of cold dishes and a menu of hot ones. I enjoyed a bowl of sweet papaya, mango and tree tomato, in house baked gluten free bread and a spinach and zucchini omelet, accompanied by a sweet potato mash and a spicy house made pili pili sauce. To drink, it was dark and smooth coffee, made from Rwandan coffee beans. In a city where most of the properties fall either into the mid tier category or are chains, this boutique hotel is a much needed addition to the hotel scene. It's luxurious, individually owned and envelops guests with a kind of hospitality that may leave them feeling wistful when it's time to check out. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
Two Strains of Polio Are Gone, but the End of the Disease Is Still Far Off In another milestone on the long, expensive and sometimes discouraging road to wiping out polio, global health officials announced Wednesday that two of the three strains of wild polio virus have officially been eliminated. Although that brings the world another step closer to eradication, the effort has taken far longer than was ever anticipated. When the campaign began in 1988, most public health officials and donors expected the battle to be over by 2000. First, millions of families around the world have not let their children have the drops because of persistent false rumors that the vaccine is a Western plot to sterilize Muslim girls or do other harm. Second, in some countries viruses used in the oral vaccine itself have mutated into a form that can be passed on in diapers and sewage, and can paralyze unvaccinated children. That has contributed to fear of the oral vaccine, even though full vaccination is the only protection against such mutant viruses. Just in the last two months, cases of paralysis caused by mutant vaccine viruses have been reported in the Philippines, Zambia, Togo and Chad. Because paralysis occurs in only about one in every 200 cases of polio, experts assume many more children have been infected. Stopping such outbreaks typically requires vaccinating hundreds of thousands of children with both the injectable vaccine, which contains killed virus that cannot mutate, and the oral vaccine. The latter contains weakened viruses that normally cannot cause disease but provide better protection than killed viruses. The strain that the Global Certification Commission for the Eradication of Poliovirus declared eliminated this week is Type 3 wild polio virus, the last case of which was seen in Nigeria in 2012. Type 2 was declared eliminated in 2015; the last case was detected in India in 1999. Type 1, the only wild strain left, circulates only in Pakistan and Afghanistan. Enormous, multiyear surveillance efforts are required before a viral strain can be declared extinct. Children can be paralyzed by several other viruses, by bacterial brain infections and by neck and spine injuries. In addition, r earranging the genes that create the polymerase, which helps the virus copy itself, means fewer "copying errors" that may be dangerous. Because most recent outbreaks have been caused by mutant versions of Type 2, the foundation has fast tracked clinical trials on that strain of the new vaccine, Dr. Bandyopadhyay said. "If all goes well, it could be ready as early as 2020," he said. Novel versions of Type 1 and Type 3 vaccines should follow in another couple of years, he said. The new versions are not intended for routine vaccination, he said, but for an emergency stockpile used to fight outbreaks. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
WASHINGTON When Jerome H. Powell, the Federal Reserve chair, and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin appear before the House Financial Services Committee on Tuesday, they are likely to field a volley of questions on the Fed's never before tried efforts to help big companies fund themselves. The Fed managed to unstick the corporate bond market in which large firms sell debt to willing investors in order to finance operations in late March and early April by simply promising to get into the market and buy bonds. In May, it began to actually intervene in the market by purchasing exchange traded funds, which track a broad index of bonds but trade like stocks. In mid June, the Fed began directly buying bonds that had already been issued, using an index it had created to guide those purchases. Accusations that the central bank bailed out big companies started even before it had actually spent a penny on the efforts. Fed officials say they just are trying to encourage smooth market functioning without giving any individual firm a boost, and that by helping big employers, the policies safeguard the overall economy. The Fed is taking a formulaic approach to its buying, which could help to defend itself against any accusations of favoritism. Here is what the Fed is doing, its rationale, and the lingering controversies around its approach. The Fed first announced on March 23 that it would buy corporate bonds on both the secondary market the one for already issued debt and the primary market. Both of those programs operate under the central bank's emergency lending powers, which allow it to act as a lender of last resort to restore market functioning in times of crisis. On April 9, the Fed announced that the two programs would be supported by 75 billion in money given to the Treasury Department as part of Congress's recently passed coronavirus economic response package. The money was meant to back up 250 billion in secondary market purchases and 500 billion in primary market buying. The programs are new territory for the Fed, which didn't buy corporate debt even in the depths of the financial crisis. But they were unveiled at a time when the ability of companies to finance themselves by selling debt had ground to near total standstill. The mere announcement that the Fed was coming to the rescue touched off a rush of new corporate debt issuance as markets began moving again and businesses raced to raise funding amid the coronavirus crisis. What has the secondary market program bought so far? The secondary market program got up and running first, buying Exchange Traded Funds bundles of debt that trade like stocks starting in mid May. As of June 18, the Fed had bought about 5.3 billion in so called E.T.F.s. The central bank announced on June 15 that it would begin to transition away from E.T.F. purchases and toward direct purchases of already issued bonds, with the goal of matching a broad index it had created as a guide. That index is meant to reflect the available universe of bonds that fit the program's restrictions, with limits for individual issuers. The Fed put out details of the initial index on Sunday. It covers 12 sectors, includes 794 firms, and the companies with the highest weights are Toyota Motor Credit, Volkswagen Group America, Daimler Finance, AT T and Apple. On June 16 and June 17, the only days for which detailed data on individual bond purchases are available, the Fed bought about 429 million in bonds. The largest purchases were of Comcast, the pharmaceutical company AbbVie and AT T bonds. Ford and Rivian no longer plan to work jointly on electric vehicles. Elizabeth Holmes took the stand in her trial. Follow along with our reporters. Ken Griffin, head of Citadel, bid highest for a copy of the Constitution. This does not mean the Fed is deviating from its plan to help your cable provider. On a day to day basis, purchases in the secondary program vary from the index based on what is actually available in the market. Detailed data on additional bond buying will be released roughly monthly on the program's disclosure page, and the index composition will also be updated regularly to make sure it continues to track the market. So far, aggregate figures on the corporate bond buying program show the Fed bought a total of 8.7 billion in bonds and E.T.F.s through Wednesday. How does the primary market program differ? The Fed's primary market corporate credit program, which became operational on Monday, could provide more direct financing to companies. The program gives relatively healthy companies a last ditch option to sell debt straight to the central bank program if they are struggling to raise funding. Unlike in the program that buys already issued bonds, companies have to opt in to have the Fed buy their new debt. Analysts and the Fed itself expect few companies to do so. That's because the program is designed to be a backstop. To use it, a company must check several boxes: The firm must be unable to get "adequate credit" from banks and markets. It must be investment grade meaning it is seen as a safe bet or have been downgraded to junk bond status only after March 22. Even the so called fallen angels those companies downgraded after March 22 must retain a relatively high junk bond rating and cannot use the program if they are deemed insolvent. At the moment, fairly healthy companies are having no major problems issuing bonds, so there is little reason to expect that they would turn to the facility. That said, the program could help businesses to fund themselves if market conditions sour. Senator Patrick J. Toomey, a Pennsylvania Republican on the oversight commission tasked with monitoring the Treasury backed Fed lending programs, has questioned why the Fed is buying already issued corporate debt at all, given how much markets have calmed down. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Economy |
In the last year, the anchor of "NBC Nightly News With Lester Holt" has traveled to places as others have fled, including Paris, Brussels and Nice. On a moment's notice, he has also flown to Orlando and Dallas to cover gun violence and, with more planning, to Cleveland and Philadelphia for the political conventions. Next is Rio de Janeiro, where he will anchor "Nightly News" from Copacabana Beach during the Summer Olympic Games, Aug. 4 to 19. Rio will be his eighth consecutive Games. Mr. Holt took a break from the Republican National Convention to talk about his news driven style of travel and the challenges and rewards of attending the Olympics. Following are edited excerpts from that conversation. Q. Given the unpredictability of your travels, do you keep a bag packed at the office? A. There was a time when I had a suitcase that was ready to go. The problem is you never know what kind of story you're going to be sent out on. It always seemed that when I needed suits, instead I had flood gear in it, or vice versa. I have a closet at home that I largely dedicate to alternative work gear. So there's things like rain slickers, wading boots, tourniquets, flashlights, because I never know if we're going to be in a hostile environment or a disaster zone. I even have dog tags with my blood type on them. But I can tell you many a time my travels have started with a stop at the local J. Crew or Banana Republic or whatever the local version of that is to get something to wear beyond Day 1. What were your favorite Olympic host cities? I had a blast in Athens. In Greece, the food is wonderful, the people are wonderful, the weather is wonderful. It was one of those places I went and I said, "I'll be back." Vancouver was another favorite. It's just so cool, that whole Pacific Asian vibe, and it's got great restaurants. For those who may be making their first Olympic trip, what's the best way to approach the event? I think you have to do some planning in terms of tickets. But I always advise people the Olympics extend beyond the arenas and the stadiums. They usually envelop the entire city. People are thrilled to have the Olympics in their town. They're friendly, they want to talk. I love if I can break away and enjoy a city and its people and get off the beaten track. That's the way I like to travel anyway, but I think the Olympics are an exceptionally good time for that. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
DENVER The Federal Reserve chair, Jerome H. Powell, said on Tuesday that the central bank would again begin expanding its portfolio of government backed securities and continued to leave the door open to another interest rate cut this month. While "policy is not on a preset course," Mr. Powell said, the Fed will "act as appropriate to support continued growth." Mr. Powell, speaking at an economics conference in Denver, emphasized that the Fed's next meeting was a few weeks away. He said officials were monitoring weaker global growth and uncertainties arising from trade tensions and Britain's negotiations to leave the European Union. While he demurred on whether the Fed will cut interest rates for a third time since July, he offered the clearest signal yet that the Fed will soon buy Treasury securities to expand its balance sheet. The central bank has been saying for months that it will eventually need to expand its holdings again to keep an ample supply of banking reserves currency deposits at the Fed in the financial system. "That time is now upon us," Mr. Powell said. He added that the Fed "will soon announce measures to add to the supply of reserves over time." Last month, an obscure but important corner of financial markets overnight repurchase agreements made between banks and other financial institutions saw a spike in interest rates that spilled into other money market rates. It even briefly pushed the federal funds rate, the Fed's main policy tool, above its range. The episode prompted the Federal Reserve Bank of New York to jump into the market to smooth things over for the first time since the financial crisis. Many market observers have said that might not have been necessary had the central bank kept a bigger balance sheet. By shrinking its asset holdings, the Fed also drained bank reserves from the financial system. While several factors could have contributed to the episode, "it is clear that without a sufficient quantity of reserves in the banking system, even routine increases in funding pressures can lead to outsized movements in money market interest rates," Mr. Powell said in his remarks. But Mr. Powell emphasized that the coming move is not equivalent to the large bond buying campaign that the Fed undertook during the Great Recession. That effort, known as quantitative easing, or Q.E., was meant to lift the economy at a difficult moment. The Fed's effort now would be aimed largely at avoiding the type of volatility that took place in mid September. "This is not Q.E.," Mr. Powell said, repeatedly, in a question and answer session after the speech. Mr. Powell's remarks underscore the challenge facing the central bank, from both a policy setting and a communications standpoint. Officials want to make sure that monetary policy is appropriately set to insulate the economy from any potential shocks. But they are trying to gauge whether that requires future policy adjustments at a time when domestic economic data is generally holding up and the consumer appears resilient. Policymakers must also explain why they are resuming balance sheet expansion after stopping their efforts to shrink their holdings in August. Officials are trying to make clear that the change is purely technical meant to keep money markets functioning smoothly and the Fed's policy interest rate at the right level and not an attempt to stoke the economy. President Trump's regular criticism of the central bank risks further clouding that message. The president has spent months calling for interest rate cuts and an end to balance sheet shrinking. While the Fed operates independently of the White House and officials say their moves are based on economic developments and not politics, there is a risk that some onlookers will believe the central bank has capitulated to Mr. Trump. Covid's impact on the supply chain continues. The pandemic has disrupted nearly every aspect of the global supply chain and made all kinds of products harder to find. In turn, scarcity has caused the prices of many things to go higher as inflation remains stubbornly high. Almost anything manufactured is in short supply. That includes everything from toilet paper to new cars. The disruptions go back to the beginning of the pandemic, when factories in Asia and Europe were forced to shut down and shipping companies cut their schedules. First, demand for home goods spiked. Money that Americans once spent on experiences were redirected to things for their homes. The surge clogged the system for transporting goods to the factories that needed them and finished products piled up because of a shortage of shipping containers. Now, ports are struggling to keep up. In North America and Europe, where containers are arriving, the heavy influx of ships is overwhelming ports. With warehouses full, containers are piling up. The chaos in global shipping is likely to persist as a result of the massive traffic jam. No one really knows when the crisis will end. Shortages and delays are likely to affect this year's Christmas and holiday shopping season, but what happens after that is unclear. Jerome Powell, the Federal Reserve chair, said he expects supply chain problems to persist "likely well into next year." The Fed has cut interest rates twice since July as trade uncertainty weighs on business investment and a global manufacturing slowdown hits American factories. While officials often repeat that the United States economy is solid, changes to interest rates take time to filter though the economy. Policymakers set them with an eye toward how future growth appears to be shaping up not just how the data looks today. Risks to that outlook have been running high. Germany's economy seems to be on the brink of a recession, and China's has been weakening. While Chinese trade negotiators are in Washington this week, it remains unclear whether a comprehensive resolution to the trade war can be reached. Britain's negotiations to exit the European Union are reportedly on shaky ground. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Economy |
When critics reach for analogies to describe Donald Trump or look for examples of democratic deterioration they tend to look abroad. They point to Russia under Vladimir Putin, Hungary under Viktor Orban, or Turkey under Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Trump, in this view, is a type an authoritarian strongman. But it's a foreign type, and his corrupt administration is seen as alien to the American experience. This is a little too generous to the United States. It's not just that we have had moments of authoritarian government as well as presidents, like John Adams or Woodrow Wilson, with autocratic impulses but that an entire region of the country was once governed by an actual authoritarian regime. That regime was Jim Crow, a system defined by a one party rule and violent repression of racial minorities. The reason this matters is straightforward. Look beyond America's borders for possible authoritarian futures and you might miss important points of continuity with our own past. Which is to say that if authoritarian government is in our future, there's no reason to think it won't look like something we've already built, versus something we've imported. Americans don't usually think of Jim Crow as a kind of authoritarianism, or of the Jim Crow South as a collection of authoritarian states. To the extent that there is one, the general view is that the Jim Crow South was a democracy, albeit racist and exclusionary. People voted in elections, politicians exchanged power and institutions like the press had a prominent place in public life. There's a strong case to be made that this is wrong. "To earn the moniker," argues the political scientist Robert Mickey in "Paths Out of Dixie: The Democratization of Authoritarian Enclaves in America's Deep South, 1944 1972," "democracies must feature free and fair elections, the safeguarding of rights necessary to sustain such elections such as freedoms of assembly, association, and speech and a state apparatus sufficiently responsive to election winners and autonomous from social and economic forces that these elections are meaningful." Mark Penn and Andrew Stein write that "only a broader course correction to the center will give Democrats a fighting chance in 2022" and beyond. Tory Gavito and Adam Jentleson write that the Virgina loss should "shock Democrats into confronting the powerful role that racially coded attacks play in American politics." Ezra Klein speaks to David Shor, who discusses his fear that Democrats face electoral catastrophe unless they shift their messaging. Ross Douthat writes that the outcome of the Virginia gubernatorial race shows Democrats need a "new way to talk about progressive ideology and education." By that standard, the Jim Crow South was not democratic. But does that make it authoritarian? A look at the creation of Jim Crow can help us answer the question. Jim Crow did not emerge immediately after the Compromise of 1877 in which Republicans agreed to withdraw federal troops from the South in return for the presidency and the end of Reconstruction. It arose, instead, as a response to a unique set of political and economic conditions in the 1890s. By the start of the decade, the historian C. Vann Woodward argued in his influential 1955 book "The Strange Career of Jim Crow," opposition to "extreme racism" had relaxed to the point of permissiveness. External restraining forces "Northern liberal opinion in the press, the courts, and the government" were more concerned with reconciling the nation than securing Southern democracy. And within the South, conservative political and business elites had abandoned restraint in the face of a radical challenge from an agrarian mass movement. Mickey notes how the Farmers' Alliance and Populist Party "clashed with state and national Democratic parties on major economic issues, including debt relief for farmers and the regulation of business." What's more, "A Colored Farmers' Alliance grew rapidly as well, and held out the possibility of biracial coalition building." This possibility became a reality in states like Alabama, Georgia and North Carolina, where Populists joined with a majority black southern Republican Party to support common lists of candidates in "fusion" agreements against an explicitly elitist and white supremacist Democratic Party. Populists and Republicans won their greatest victories in that era in North Carolina, where they captured the state legislature and governor's mansion, as well as local and county offices. Democrats, among them large landowners and "New South" industrialists, responded with violence. Democratic paramilitary organizations called "Red Shirts" attacked Populist and Republican voters, suppressing the vote throughout the state. In Republican controlled Wilmington, N.C., writes Mickey, "Democratic notables launched a wave of violence and killings of Republicans and their supporters, black and white, to take back the state's largest city; hundreds fled for good." This basic pattern repeated itself throughout the South for the next decade. Working through the Democratic Party, conservative elites "repressed Populists, seized control of the state apparatus, and effectively ended credible partisan competition." They rewrote state constitutions to end the vote for blacks as well as substantially restrict it for most whites. They gerrymandered states to secure the political power of large landowners, converted local elective offices into appointed positions controlled at the state level, "and further insulated state judiciaries from popular input." This could have been stopped, but the North was tired of sectional conflict, and the courts had no interest in the rights of blacks or anyone else under the boot of the Democrats. The southern Democratic Party didn't just control all offices and effectively staff the state bureaucracy. It was gatekeeper to all political participation. An aspiring politician could not run for office, much less win and participate in government, without having it behind him. "What is the state?" asked one prominent lawyer during Louisiana's 1898 Jim Crow constitutional convention, aptly capturing the dynamic at work, "It is the Democratic Party." Statehood was conflated with party, writes Mickey, "and party disloyalty with state treason." Southern conservatives beat back Populism and biracial democracy to build a one party state and ensure cheap labor, low taxes, white supremacy and a starkly unequal distribution of wealth. It took two decades of disruption the Great Depression, the Great Migration and the Second World War to even make change possible, and then another decade of fierce struggle to bring democracy back to the South. It's not that we can't learn from the experiences of other countries, but that our past offers an especially powerful point of comparison. Many of the same elements are in play, from the potent influence of a reactionary business elite to a major political party convinced of its singular legitimacy. A party that has already weakened our democracy to protect its power, and which shows every sign of going further should the need arise. A party that stands beside a lawless president, shielding him from accountability while he makes the government an extension of his personal will. I'm not saying a new Jim Crow is on the near horizon (or the far one, for that matter). But if we look at the actions of the political party and president now in power, if we think of how they would behave with even more control over the levers of the state, then we might be on a path that ends in something that is familiar from our past authoritarian government with a democratic facade. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Opinion |
Grim Jobs Report Is Likely to Delay a Move by the Fed on Rates Unexpectedly dismal job growth last month cast a shadow on the nation's economy, as a government report on Friday sent analysts scrambling for adjectives like "dreadful," "a body blow" and "grim" to describe just how disappointing they found the latest employment figures. The Labor Department found that the jobless rate held steady at 5.1 percent in September, but wage gains stalled, the labor force shrank and employers created many fewer positions than they had been averaging in recent months. While the latest report is only a snapshot of the economy and the weakness may ultimately prove fleeting, it made clear that ordinary workers are still failing to take home the kind of monetary rewards normally expected from a recovery that has being going on for more than six years. The new estimates came just two weeks after the Federal Reserve decided that the economy's advance remained too fragile to risk lifting interest rates from their near zero level even as it hinted an increase would come before the year's end. Now, experts said, signs of a slowdown may well push any rise into 2016. The odds of a move in December have "clearly diminished," said Carl Tannenbaum, chief economist at Northern Trust in Chicago. "There's nothing good in this morning's report." Despite the lagging economy, the mere likelihood that the Fed would yet again postpone a retreat on its stimulus program may have ultimately buoyed some investors' confidence. After opening sharply down after the Labor Department's announcement, the Standard Poor's 500 stock index turned around, ending the day up over 1.4 percent, to 1,951.36. The yield on the benchmark 10 year Treasury bond dipped below 2 percent. "That may assure the markets that unconditional support from monetary policy will be sustained," Mr. Tannenbaum said. "Low for long may go on even longer." Diane Swonk, chief economist at Mesirow Financial in Chicago, said the Fed chairwoman, Janet L. Yellen, had "really made it clear that she'd like to re engage those sidelined in recent years by allowing the unemployment rate to fall below what most consider full employment. It's the only way we're going to regain living standards lost in recent years." The Fed faces an uphill battle, she and other analysts suggested, as the United States now appears to be importing some of the economic malaise that has infected other parts of the world, particularly China and Europe. By contrast, health care, leisure and hospitality, and professional and business services remained strong, highlighting other signs of sturdiness in the economy that countered the otherwise disheartening jobs news. Consumer demand at home has been on the upswing and vehicle sales have been strong. And a broader measure of unemployment, which includes part time workers who want full time jobs and those too discouraged to even search, dipped to 10 percent in September, its lowest mark since May 2008. "Against the backdrop of accelerating real consumption, it's hard to see what's driving this softening and what could sustain it," said Ian Shepherdson, chief economist at Pantheon Macroeconomics, sounding a more optimistic note. "We have to expect better numbers next month, and the odds still strongly favor upward revisions, despite the unexpected downward revision to August." But Mr. Shepherdson was drowned out by a chorus of more negative reactions to the estimate that employers created only 142,000 jobs in September. Adding to the gloom, the Labor Department revised August's employment numbers, registering only 136,000 new jobs for that month, well below the 173,000 originally reported. With the presidential campaign already underway, neither party wasted much time in using the jobs report to attack the other side. Republicans criticized the president for promoting a program that they argue stifles economic growth. The slowdown may provide a political opening for Republican contenders to attack Mr. Obama and the Democrats on an issue that was not resonating as much with voters when the job market was on the upswing. In response, President Obama vowed on Friday not to sign another temporary spending measure after the one passed this week in an effort to raise the pressure on Congress to reach a long term agreement to finance the government. Speaking to reporters at the White House, Mr. Obama warned that the economy could be endangered by the continual game of budget chicken encouraged by conservative Republicans in hopes of forcing Democrats to give ground on other issues, like health care and the fate of Planned Parenthood. To prevent a recurrence, he said he would veto any further budget measures postponing a full fledged spending plan. "I will not sign another shortsighted spending bill like the one Congress sent me this week," Mr. Obama said. "We purchased ourselves another 10 weeks. We need to use them." While overall growth remains on a slow but steady track, the job outlook varies markedly depending on geography, training and industry. Looking at the feeble rise in median wages, Andrew Chamberlain, chief economist at Glassdoor Economic Research, pointed out that such figures masked a wide disparity among industries. Workers in financial services, construction and graphic design, for example, have on average enjoyed double digit wage growth from the previous year. Those stuck in neutral or suffering from effective wage declines included those in the manufacturing, retail clothing and textile industries. The demand for young, high technology workers has been evident to Isaac Oates, the chief executive of Justworks, a human resources management company that handles mostly small businesses. "We see that a lot of companies are growing quickly" in this area, saying his own firm has grown to 60 workers from 40 over the past three months in order to keep pace. Other industries, like travel and leisure, have proved more resilient job creators, even if wages have not grown much. An improving housing market has also helped push down the number of unemployed workers with construction experience to its lowest level since 2000, according to the Associated General Contractors of America. The picture is bleaker for those in the low skill corners of the economy. "We're still finding a lot of skilled jobs come open, but it's certainly slowed down for the unskilled," said Robert A. Funk, chairman and chief executive of Express Employment Professionals, a staffing agency based in Oklahoma City with 750 offices. Skilled workers are at a premium at Advanced Technology Services, a manufacturing consulting company based in Peoria, Ill. "Where we're struggling is in the area of talented people in manufacturing," Jeff Owens, the company's president, said, mentioning that he would like to add about 160 managers, electricians, information technology workers and machinists to his 3,300 person staff. Location also matters. Mr. Funk, a former chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, said he observed a slowing down in the last six weeks, with the biggest drop offs in the oil drilling states, including Texas, Oklahoma and North and South Dakota. Others fear that the economy is never going to deliver many gains to workers who have been waiting years to receive any bounty from the upswing in business activity. William Spriggs, chief economist for the A.F.L. C.I.O., said: "We've pretty much reached a kind of stability, and the unemployment rate will continue to fall, mostly because of retirements." An analysis this week from Morgan Stanley noted that the decline in the unemployment rate to 5.1 percent in August, from 5.5 percent in May, was almost entirely attributable to changes in the labor force participation rate. The percentage of the working age population that is employed which many economists consider a better indicator of the health of the job market than the official jobless figure has stayed flat at under 60 percent for several years, still well below its prerecession level of about 63. Public sector jobs were one of the few bright spots, growing by 24,000 in September, thanks to hiring on the state and local level. But government workers from teachers to police officers to transit workers have not made up the lost ground, said Elise Gould, a senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute, a labor oriented research organization in Washington. "The number of teachers and education staff fell dramatically during the recession," Ms. Gould said, "and has failed to recover to anywhere near its prerecession level, let alone the level that would be required to keep up with an expanding student population." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Economy |
Following the presentation of evidence in President Trump's Senate trial, Senator Susan Collins argued that the president did not need to be removed from office because he has learned a "pretty big lesson" from his impeachment. The president did in fact learn lessons from his impeachment and acquittal, but all the wrong lessons, which he since has been applying in misleading the American people about the catastrophic pandemic, and exacerbating its devastating impact. Mr. Trump was impeached because when confronted with an urgent crisis that threatened the security of our country Russia's hostile invasion of Ukraine he put his personal and political interests over the interests of the country. He refused to protect the American people by releasing previously approved and desperately needed military aid for our vital ally unless that country agreed to help his re election by announcing an investigation of his political rival Joe Biden. While serving as special counsel to the House Judiciary Committee, I warned in my opening statement for the committee's impeachment hearings that if the president got away with what he did, "our imagination is the only limit to what President Trump may do next." Those concerns have unfortunately proved prescient, as the lesson Mr. Trump apparently learned from his Senate acquittal is that he could once again get away with putting his personal and political interests over the safety of the American people when confronted with an even more dire crisis. The parallels are striking and, as with all recidivists, are particularly important for what they reveal about the president's motives, intent and modus operandi. In other words, we have seen this movie before. In considering President Trump's motives, there is little doubt that he warned that he might withhold desperately needed equipment from states whose governors did not express appreciation for his efforts, such as Gov. Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan, to force these vulnerable leaders to act in his political interests. Of course, that is exactly the same card he played in response to Ukraine's request. The reason the president has made blatantly false claims about the availability of testing, the unmet needs of states for ventilators and masks, and the potential of unproven cures is again to advance his political standing by embellishing the success of his efforts. The reason he dismissed early pronouncements of the dangers of the virus by the health experts in his administration, and denied their validity, is because he cared more about the stock market falling and potentially harming his re election prospects. There can be little doubt that the president acted knowingly and intentionally in putting his personal and political interests over the health and safety of the American people by delaying the measures recommended by his advisers. Reports over the past few days reveal that he was warned in late January and early February of the costs of not acting quickly by his most senior advisers, including his health and human services secretary, Alex Azar, and his principal trade adviser, Peter Navarro. And last weekend, Dr. Anthony Fauci, the head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and the administration's top infectious disease expert, appeared to confirm that he and his colleagues warned of the need for social distancing in mid February, following a New York Times report detailing the delays. But President Trump nevertheless dismissed those warnings, and delayed announcing the need for social distancing and other actions recommended by his experts. What these disclosures reveal about the president's state of mind is not that his impeachment and Senate trial distracted him from these risks, as he and his supporters now claim. To the contrary, he was very much aware of these risks in real time, and his acquittal taught him that he could use the same means to again get away with abusing his power for his own selfish purposes. Just as he deflected all responsibility and blamed others for the Ukraine scandal, he has done the same by simply saying "I don't take responsibility at all" for the pandemic, and again blaming Democrats, this time the governors facing the consequences of his actions, in addition to the Democrats who impeached him, the media and the so called deep state. The president's name calling and personal attacks on the governors, reporters and TV news anchors who tell the truth or criticize him is straight out of his impeachment playbook, mirroring his treatment of the ambassadors, administration officials and legislators who similarly told the truth about Ukraine or criticized him. Finally, the president's last move is to send a message to others that he is above the law and that anyone who reveals the truth about his actions will be punished. Mr. Trump's recent termination of the inspector general for the intelligence community, whose forthright handling of the whistle blower complaint helped to uncover the president's wrongdoing, follows the firing and demotion of the other patriots who came forth with the truth about his misconduct toward Ukraine. It was clearly intended to send a message. In fact, immediately following his termination of the intelligence community inspector general, he removed the Defense Department's acting inspector general, who had just been chosen to lead the Pandemic Response Accountability Committee and provide oversight of the administration's distribution of 2.2 trillion in coronavirus relief funds. The president will no doubt also try to seek retribution against those who tell the truth about what he knew of the Covid 19 risks and when he knew it. That may already be in the works, as reflected in the president's retweet last week of a post critical of Dr. Fauci that ended with FireFauci. There is one administration official who deserves to lose his position for once again putting his own personal and political interests before those of the nation. The American people will make that decision in November and teach the president the right lesson. Barry Berke is a trial lawyer who specializes in white collar criminal defense. The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We'd like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here's our email: letters nytimes.com. Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter ( NYTopinion) and Instagram. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Opinion |
Bill Murray, Bryan Cranston and Tilda Swinton are among the stars providing the voices in "Isle of Dogs." 'Isle of Dogs' to Open Berlin Film Festival. But Has it Lost Its Way? BERLIN The Berlin Film Festival, or Berlinale as it is known here, is set to open on Thursday with the world premiere of Wes Anderson's new stop motion film, "Isle of Dogs." The genre defying fable which centers on a group of canines in a dystopian Japan and features the voices of Bryan Cranston and Edward Norton is the highest profile feature in the 10 day festival, which will showcase nearly 400 films and is expected to include 500,000 theater visits. The event has been clouded by a debate about its direction under Dieter Kosslick, who has headed the festival since 2001. In an interview, he welcomed suggestions for improvement and argued that complaints about his programming choices were largely a matter of differing tastes. This year's Berlinale is lighter on big names than some past editions, but is to include contributions from Steven Soderbergh, Gus Van Sant, Isabel Coixet and Christian Petzold, a German filmmaker who is a festival favorite. The program also features the directorial debuts of the actors Rupert Everett and Idris Elba. The German filmmaker Tom Tykwer, known for directing the 1998 cult movie "Run Lola Run" and, most recently, cocreating the hit television series "Babylon Berlin," is leading the international jury. The Berlinale is a sprawling event not only geographically, with venues stretching across the German capital, but also in terms of focus. It includes sections about "culinary cinema," centered on films about food; television series; and works created by indigenous peoples around the world, as well as a large film market. Some critics have argued in recent years that this expansiveness has come at the cost of curatorial selectiveness and prestige, causing the festival to fall behind the two other major European festivals, Cannes and Venice. The debate about the festival's direction has been especially pointed this year; Mr. Kosslick has already said that he will step down in May 2019 when his contract ends. In November, 79 members of the German film industry signed an open letter calling for a "new start" for the festival after Mr. Kosslick's departure, and for a gender balanced, international selection committee to be created to help find his replacement or replacements. "The change in leadership offers the opportunity to renew and purify the festival's program," the letter read. Its signatories included many of the biggest directors in German cinema, among them Fatih Akin, whose "In the Fade" won this year's Golden Globe for best foreign language film. The letter has been widely discussed in the German media. Speaking last week in the festival's office, Mr. Kosslick seemed tired of addressing the criticism. He said that he was open to discussing changes to the festival, but was disappointed that no concrete suggestions had been made. "If there is no discussion, then I cannot do anything with that. I cannot criticize my own festival," he added. He said that pleasing the audience had been one of his primary goals since taking over the festival in 2001. "This has worked pretty well," he added. Attendance has doubled in the past 15 years, he said, and a recent survey commissioned by the festival and carried out by an independent polling firm had found high satisfaction among attendees. Berlin is also the most politically minded of the three main European festivals. Mr. Kosslick said that, in an era of rising populism, he sought for his programming to "show what the world really looks like." This year's lineup includes several films about migrants, like Mr. Petzold's "Transit," an adaptation of a novel about World War II refugees in France that will be screening in competition; and "Eldorado," a documentary addressing the economic causes and social consequences of Europe's refugee crisis. Mr. Kosslick said that this year's festival had been shaped by the MeToo movement, which he said "overlays everything." He praised the festival's various initiatives for combating sexual violence and gender inequality, and he has said elsewhere that the festival had excluded several films from consideration because people associated with them faced accusations of sexual misconduct. This week, however, a South Korean actress held an anonymous news conference accusing the festival of hypocrisy for including "Human, Space, Time and Human," the latest film by South Korean director Kim Ki duk, in the Panorama section despite her claims that he hit her and forced her into unwanted sex scenes during the filming of his 2013 film "Moebius." Prosecutors later dropped the sex abuse charges for lack of evidence, and Mr. Kim was ordered to pay a fine for slapping the actress, South Korea's Yonhap News Agency reported. In an emailed statement, Mr. Kosslick wrote that the festival would "eschew prejudgment" and go ahead with the screening, but that "the Berlinale condemns all kinds of violence on set be it of sexual or other origin." Plans for the festival after Mr. Kosslick's departure remain unclear; his successor is due to be selected this year. In any case, Mr. Kosslick, has few regrets. "The audience has stayed loyal to the Berlinale over 68 years, and grown, especially in the last 17 years," he said last week. "And that makes me happy." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
There has been a reprieve: After an outcry from artists, composers, listeners and staffers, WNYC FM announced Monday that it had reversed its plans to cancel "New Sounds," the influential, eclectic new music program that has expanded the city's tastes for 37 years. "There was an overwhelming response from the community: I'm sure it took everybody in management by surprise," John Schaefer, the program's host, said in a telephone interview. "It took me by surprise." "There were people writing not just impassioned emails, but really thoughtful emails," he said, "making points about what public radio should be." The station had announced on Oct. 10 that it planned to end "New Sounds" which was often the first place to hear future Pulitzer Prize winning composers, avant garde rockers and music from different parts of the world by the end of the year, along with most of its remaining music programming, as part of a shift to more news and talk. The protests were immediate. "Why would they do that?" the avant garde musician Laurie Anderson, who was the program's first guest in 1982, said in an interview when the news broke. Julia Wolfe, a Pulitzer winning composer, spoke of the vital role the program played in new music circles: "It was huge, because we were just kids, and we did this crazy thing, and there it was, on the radio." The composer Gabriel Kahane set that quotation of hers to music, and posted it on Twitter. Some listeners took to social media to say they were dropping their WNYC memberships. Others protested last week at a WNYC community advisory board meeting. And many WNYC staff members spoke out against its cancellation including at a tense staff meeting last Friday with Goli Sheikholeslami, who began work as the station's new president and chief executive officer this month. (In her email inviting the staff to the meeting to share their thoughts, Ms. Sheikholeslami wrote that she was "not yet here when the decision was made" to end the program.) On Monday Ms. Sheikholeslami, announced that the program had been saved: It would continue to be broadcast seven nights a week, and to be available online at newsounds.org. Several other threatened features, including Gig Alerts, were preserved as well. "I appreciate your candor, your thoughtfulness, and your commitment to our mission here at New York Public Radio," Ms. Sheikholeslami wrote in an email to her staff. "I've also read the heartfelt responses from our listeners and the larger New York City cultural community who have come to rely on John Schaefer and 'New Sounds' for musical discovery, creative inspiration, and access to a community of music lovers they can't find anywhere else." Asked whether any foundations had threatened to pull their support from the station because of the cancellation, Jennifer Houlihan Roussel, a spokeswoman for WNYC, said in an email that the decision to reinstate it had not been financially motivated. "Funders and members were among those who were disappointed with the decision," she wrote, "and the feedback we received from many constituents led us to the decision we announced this morning." Ms. Anderson said in an email that she was delighted by the reversal, and that she hoped it would help the station's coming pledge drive. "Both the cancellation and the reversal," she wrote, "reminded me of how vital these shows are in the middle of the vast sea of commercial and straight up pop music." And Mr. Schaefer who had asked Ms. Anderson, his first guest, to be his last said that he still looked forward to having her back on the show. "It's not going to be the interview that we feared it would be," he said. "She does have a fine new recording that I've wanted to discuss." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
BOSTON The 2008 financial crisis convinced most people in the world of central banking that it would be a good idea to try to prevent that kind of thing from happening again. But policy makers have made little progress in figuring out how they might actually do so, a troubling reality highlighted at a conference that ended over the weekend at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston. The Fed has publicly committed itself to a strategy of so called macroprudential regulation, meaning it is now focused on maintaining the stability of the financial system as well as the health of individual firms. But senior Fed officials at the Boston conference described that as more of a goal than an achievement. Crises remain hard to anticipate and prevent, and the available tools could cause significant economic damage. "My own view is that while the use of macroprudential tools holds promise, we are a long way from being able to successfully use such tools in the United States," William C. Dudley, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, told the conference. In the meantime, the importance of prevention has only increased because the Fed's ability to respond to the outbreak of a crisis has diminished. The 2010 Dodd Frank Act prevents the Fed from repeating some aspects of its 2008 actions. More important, the Fed expects interest rates to remain below historic norms for the foreseeable future, leaving less room to cut rates, which has long been its first line of defense. Donald Kohn, a former Fed vice chairman, said he was troubled by the gap between perception and reality. "If you ask people who is responsible for financial stability they would say, 'The Fed,' " said Mr. Kohn, a senior fellow in economic studies at the Brookings Institution. "But the Fed doesn't really have the instruments. It doesn't really have the tools. "And I think this is a dangerous situation if people perceive that it has the responsibility and it doesn't have the tools." The obvious reason to prevent bubbles is that crises are bad for the economy. Seven years after the peak of the 2008 crisis, the Fed still has not been able to drive unemployment or inflation back to normal levels. The unemployment rate has fallen to 5.1 percent a level usually associated in the past with a robust economy but that figure overstates the current health of the labor market. Eric Rosengren, head of the Boston Fed, has argued that financial stability should be part of the objectives of monetary policy. Prices, meanwhile, rose just 0.3 percent in the 12 month period ending in August, far below the 2 percent level the Fed would like to achieve to support healthy spending and investment. The basic problem for regulators is that crises are hard to predict. A 2012 study by the International Monetary Fund concluded that only about one third of credit booms ended in crashes. Many instead produced permanent economic benefits. And even in retrospect, the researchers found it hard to identify clear warning signs. So popping bubbles probably means curtailing some beneficial booms, too. "We'll have to make a choice about how much growth we are willing to give up in good times to limit the likelihood of a future financial crisis," said Loretta J. Mester, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland. Other officials and experts also share Mr. Dudley's doubts about the Fed's power to pop bubbles. American regulators have fewer tools than some of their European counterparts, and those tools are distributed among a number of agencies that have little history of cooperating either quickly or effectively. "The current U.S. institutional setup is likely to fail in a crisis and will do less to prevent a crisis than it should," said Adam S. Posen, president of the Peterson Institute for International Economics. "And we are likely to suffer from this." Frederic S. Mishkin, a former Fed governor, noted that financial firms tend to resist increased regulation, often with considerable success. "They're going to hire a lot of lawyers to figure out how to get around these regulations and undermine them," Mr. Mishkin, a Columbia University economist, said. These constraints on the Fed's ability to recognize and respond to problems as they are developing has led officials to emphasize measures that strengthen the resilience of the financial system. A prominent example: stricter limits on banks' reliance on borrowed money. Mr. Dudley said progress in this area should provide "considerable solace" to those worried about the slow progress of macroprudential regulation. Some officials, however, argue that a more drastic shift may be necessary. They want the Fed to use its most powerful tool raising and lowering interest rates to help maintain the stability of financial markets. The Fed might curb speculative excesses by raising interest rates. Similarly, it could soothe fragile financial markets by holding rates steady, as it is doing now, or by cutting rates, as it does during downturns. Janet L. Yellen, the Fed's chairwoman, has generally resisted this suggestion, arguing in a 2014 speech that monetary policy should remain focused on moderating inflation and minimizing unemployment. Raising interest rates across the economy to limit speculation in a particular area is the rough equivalent of weeding a garden with a bulldozer. Ms. Yellen has suggested she would consider it only as a last resort. But Ms. Yellen's deputy, the Fed vice chairman Stanley Fischer, said on Friday at the Boston conference that the use of monetary policy for such goals deserves consideration. "There may be times when adjustments to monetary policy should be discussed as a means to curb risks to financial stability," he said. Jeremy C. Stein, a former Fed governor, has argued that the broader effects of raising interest rates actually numbers among its virtues, because it potentially enables the Fed to discourage risky speculation it has not even managed to identify. Eric S. Rosengren, the Boston Fed president, argued in a paper that opened the conference that financial stability should join inflation and employment as explicit objectives of monetary policy. Moreover, Mr. Rosengren and his co authors presented evidence that the Fed already treats financial stability as a goal. They showed that the movement of the Fed's benchmark rate tracks discussions of financial stability at Fed policy making sessions. Others, however, said it was not clear that raising rates was a more effective means of addressing risks to the financial system than sensible regulation. "I'm a skeptic," Mr. Kohn, of Brookings, said. "I think that monetary policy, changes in interest rates, are likely to be not very effective in damping a lot of these cycles." The current discussion is largely framed by the details of the last crisis. Mark Gertler, a professor of economics at New York University, said he saw little reason to think the Fed could have curbed the rise of housing prices in the years leading up to the 2008 crisis by raising interest rates more quickly. He noted that Britain had higher rates than the United States and just as severe a housing bubble. Instead, Mr. Gertler said, "We can certainly imagine that some kind of restrictions on the subprime market might have been a more effective way to contain this mess." Nellie Liang, director of the Fed's office of Financial Stability Policy and Research, presented a study showing that changes in interest rates have a limited effect on credit booms in the early stages, and then even that fades away. That suggested that macroprudential measures had a role to play. Luc Laeven, director general for research at the European Central Bank, provided a fitting, if disheartening, summary of the conference. "Both monetary policy and macroprudential policy are not really very effective," Mr. Laeven said. He added a plaintive question. "Do we have other policies?" | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Economy |
DUBLIN On a December day seven years ago, the poet Seamus Heaney drove up to the back door of the National Library of Ireland, his car packed with 12 boxes of attic. The haul was more than 10,000 pieces of paper drafts of poems on envelopes and halfway there typescripts, even a clipping of one he first published in a daily newspaper and later reworked in pen and pencil on the printed page. Plus lined notebooks, galleys and so on, the archive of a productive literary life. Now that collection and other sources have been harvested to create a tasting menu of Heaney, young to old, in "Listen Now Again," an exhibit to be housed for three years in a cultural space at the Bank of Ireland on College Green, here in Dublin. At the time of the gift, Heaney, 72, was a global bardic presence, a Nobel laureate wreathed in acclaim as one of the leading poets in the world. An unstaged Irishman, Heaney wove eloquence and beguiling modesty into a single strand that ran through his public life. It also ties together the exhibit, from the entryway a circle of pillars evocative of Neolithic standing stones, decorated with moments in the Heaney biography and oeuvre to the exit, where a street artist's painting of Heaney's last words are projected on a Dublin tenement. ("Don't be afraid," it says, a translation of Noli timere, the Latin text he sent on Aug. 30, 2013, to his wife as he waited to be wheeled into surgery for repair of a splitting aorta.) The exhibit, curated by Professor Geraldine Higgins of Emory University in Atlanta, Ga., presents about 100 items and gives them a multimedia charge with audio readings, videos and screens that show the progress of revisions in the blink of a digital eye. "We could quite happily have had 500 pieces," said Katherine McSharry of the National Library. Newcomers to Heaney's works should find pleasure and epiphany in them, with no need to bring along a decipher key. His voice and vision made poetry from blackberry picking and ritual murder; from peeled potatoes in a bucket and epic travels in the afterlife; from a glimpse of his wife plunging into a swimming pool, and the tug of an airborne kite "a tightened drumhead, an armful of blown chaff" as he handed its string to his sons. Stand in here in front of me and take the strain. In the displays of drafts, the exhibit gets behind the finished walls to expose the gears of his poem making. Writing in the margin of a newspaper clipping, Heaney fortified a version of "Postscript" first published in The Irish Times. Want to keep up with the latest and greatest in books? This is a good place to start. None Learn what you should be reading this fall: Our collection of reviews on books coming out this season includes biographies, novels, memoirs and more. See what's new in October: Among this month's new titles are novels by Jonathan Franzen, a history of Black cinema and a biography by Katie Couric. Nominate a book: The New York Times Book Review has just turned 125. That got us wondering: What is the best book that was published during that time? Listen to our podcast: Featuring conversations with leading figures in the literary world, from Colson Whitehead to Leila Slimani, the Book Review Podcast helps you delve deeper into your favorite books. The surface of a slate grey lake is hit By the bolt lightning of a flock of swans The surface of a slate grey lake is lit By the earthed lightning of a flock of swans "We virtually never saw the poems before publication," Mr. Heaney said of himself, his brother Christopher and sister Catherine. "The first we read of them was in the book when they came out. My mother was the first reader. She's naturally poetic. They were well met." One of Heaney's most celebrated poems, topping an Irish Times poll of reader favorites from the last 100 years, captures the reverie of a young boy and his mother, home alone, readying Sunday dinner. When all the others were away at Mass I was all hers as we peeled potatoes ... That, it turns out, is the core that Heaney reached after trimming, detangling and shearing other starts and thoughts. In an early version, he also reflected on his mother's relationship with an unmarried aunt who lived on the family farm. A vanished line: You winced at her tongue, always wounding, wounding That draft recalled his mother at the water pump, sometime during a decade long siege of bearing nine children, when he was still young but old enough. So while the parish priest at her bedside Went hammer and tongs at the prayers for the dying And some were responding and some crying I remembered her head bent towards my head, Her breath in mine, our fluent dipping knives Never closer the whole rest of our lives. "In a way, it makes me appreciate how it happened," Mick Heaney said. "He worked a lot. He was at that desk many hours. " In fact, Heaney's actual desk a board across two drab filing cabinets has been borrowed from the family home in suburban Dublin. Roped off, elevated on a riser for display, it is spotlit ordinariness, like the toe bone of a saint set in a filigreed golden reliquary. The poet Patrick Kavanaugh once said that "the standing army of Irish poets never falls below 20,000." Of those legions, Heaney, and before him, William Butler Yeats, towered above all. Heaney, the son of a cattle dealer, married the writer and editor Marie Devlin when he was 26, and they did not part. Any exhibition on Heaney must rest almost entirely on the riches of his work. He got through life without a single public scandal or drama to his name practically, it seems, without ever raising his voice. He may have come by his cautiousness naturally, but it was nurtured growing up Catholic in Northern Ireland, a place mapped out to make his kind an underpowered minority. So he was fluent in the measured speech of people on the short end of the stick, writing of "the famous/Northern reticence, the tight gag of place: Where to be saved you only must save face And whatever you say, you say nothing. Heaney and Yeats each lived in ages when the gun played an outsized role in the struggles over national identity, and violence occupied space in their imaginations and intellects. Perhaps the most visible tension in Heaney's life was his determination not to deny his own sense of who he was, while not being taken as a prop for Northern Ireland's roiling conflicts. Writing to a close friend, the poet Ted Hughes, he speaks of this struggle (though first, explains why he is using letterhead from the San Antonio Four Seasons when he apparently is nowhere near Texas "I have this compulsion to take notepaper from hotels: a trace element of the younger impulse to piss in the hand basin when drunk"). In the letter, he confesses to a sense of crisis about his inclusion in a collection of British poetry, "where I figure as a kind of pride of place goodie." He was contemplating an open letter to the editors of the volume to assert his Irishness, against his instinct to keep his head down and not weave through the North's armed tribes. Yet to stay quiet was to take a risk on another plain: "If I am not careful I shall get entangled with a triumphalist Falklandia image which is equally subtly propagandist and misrepresentative." As he turned 50, he wrote to another friend, the playwright Brian Friel, in gratitude for support Friel gave him early on. He mused on the losses and change that age brings. "At any rate," Heaney writes, "the words come into my head out on the strand, 'My father and mother are dead, I'm fifty and my son is leaving home.' Old hat to a Methuselah like you, I know, but cubs like me are just getting the range of evacuated spaces." Heaney managed the rare feat among practitioners of his craft of being both widely known and cherished. The Seamus Heaney Homeplace, a cultural center in his native Bellaghy, opened two years ago. Mick Heaney acknowledged that writers are given respect in Ireland, but, he said, "It's not like everyone's sitting around reading 'Ulysses.' In Liverpool, there's the Beatles, but more to the point, there's football." Near the end of the show, a video gives Ireland's response to Heaney's unexpected death at 74. "The nation is a man down," says a letter to the Irish Times. A camera sweeps across 80,000 people at Dublin's Croke Park, awaiting kickoff at a semifinal championship match, two days after his death. An announcer intones: "We would like to mark the passing of one of our greatest literary icons, Seamus Heaney." The football fans paid the respect of shutting up, with none of the fidgeting and murmuring that are often the most polite answer a sporting herd will muster to such a request. From the aisles, applause then rose, spontaneously, gathering into a prolonged ovation that rolled across the stadium. Invited to silence to honor Heaney's death, the crowd roared for his life. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
The number of minority coaches in the N.F.L. is likely to fall by half next season, suggesting that the league's recent efforts to promote diversity in hiring are still a work in progress. Two weeks after the end of the regular season, nearly every new head coach hired has been white, which is certain to reignite the debate over whether a league in which roughly three quarters of the players are black is doing enough to promote people of color into positions of power. This season, there were eight minority coaches, tied for the most ever. Yet among eight coaches who have lost their jobs, including those fired midseason, five were black, leaving just three minority coaches two black and one Latino among the 32 coaches in the league. Thus far, six out of the seven coaches hired by teams have been white. The sudden reversal of fortune for minority coaches comes after the 32 N.F.L. owners announced in December that they were strengthening rules that obligate teams to consider minority candidates when hiring coaches and executives. At the time, the league denied that it amended the so called Rooney Rule, named for Dan Rooney, the late owner of the Pittsburgh Steelers, who championed its creation in 2003, because it was not effective enough. The rule requires teams to interview at least one minority candidate in their searches for new coaches. The N.F.L. declined to comment on coaches hired this month. With such a small sample size, big fluctuations can happen when a handful of teams have down years. The sudden decline in the number of coaches may look startling, but Richard Lapchick, the director of the Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport at the University of Central Florida, said that number is bound to rise again. Lapchick noted that there were a record eight minority coaches in 2011 before the total declined only to have it return to a record eight coaches last year. "You can't not notice when that number of black coaches gets fired," he said. But he added that it was "a part of the natural cycle" of coaches getting fired and hired. "I definitely think it has a chance to go up." Cyrus Mehri, the co founder of the Fritz Pollard Alliance, which helped establish the Rooney Rule and monitors its implementation, said his group cannot tell teams which coach to hire. Rather, the key is ensuring that teams give minority candidates an equal shot at obtaining a job, and this year, every team with an opening has followed the rules and interviewed at least one and sometimes several minority candidates. None Week 11 Takeaways: Here is what we learned this week. N.F.L. Tightens Covid Protocols: As cases rise and Thanksgiving approaches, the league is requiring masks inside team facilities and increasing testing. The Jets Lose Again: Falling to the Miami Dolphins, the Jets' receiver Elijah Moore offered consolation. The Long Path to the Super Bowl: With 18 weeks in the regular season and fewer teams earning byes in the playoffs, the Super Bowl is still a long way off. Playoff Simulator: Explore every team's path to the postseason, updated live. "You don't overcome decades of history just by snapping your finger, but we have to say the process was fully followed this year," he said. Mehri is focused on strengthening the pipeline of minorities in junior coaching jobs so the pool of candidates for head coaching spots deepens. He noted the percentage of minority offensive coordinators and quarterback coaches is still low. Minorities account for roughly 30 percent of N.F.L. assistants. "We think the league has a lot of work to do," he said, though "in the long run, we're feeling good where things are, and what's been accomplished." Still, the league has been criticized by advocates and former coaches, who have said teams have been skirting the rules. Last year, it was not clear that the Oakland Raiders conducted any good faith interviews with minority candidates for their vacancy at coach before they ultimately hired Jon Gruden, who is white. Now that teams have started to fill their coaching vacancies this year, the number of minority coaches may fall by half. The Arizona Cardinals replaced Steve Wilks, who is black, with Kliff Kingsbury, a college coach. The Green Bay Packers followed by choosing Matt LaFleur as their coach, while the Tampa Buccaneers hired Bruce Arians to replace Dirk Koetter. All three new coaches are white. The Cleveland Browns followed by hiring Freddie Kitchens, a positions coach with the team who is white. He replaced Hue Jackson, who is black and was fired during the season. Also last week, the Denver Broncos replaced Vance Joseph, who is black, with Vic Fangio, a longtime defensive coordinator, who is white. And on Monday, the Jets hired Adam Gase, who had been fired by the Miami Dolphins, to take over the team's top spot. Gase, who is white, replaced Todd Bowles, who is black. Thus far, the lone exception has been the Dolphins, who are expected to sign Brian Flores, the linebacker coach of the New England Patriots, once his team is eliminated from the playoffs. If Flores is hired, he would join Anthony Lynn of the Los Angeles Chargers, Mike Tomlin of the Pittsburgh Steelers and Ron Rivera of the Carolina Panthers as the only minority coaches. There are only a handful of minority general managers as well. Reggie McKenzie, who was named the N.F.L. executive of the year in 2016, was fired midseason by the Oakland Raiders, where he was the chief football executive. Ozzie Newsome, the first African American general manager in league history, retired after working with the Ravens since they arrived in Baltimore in 1996. To be sure, coaches are hired and fired for many reasons, including most of all, success on the field. For instance, Joseph was 11 21 in his two seasons in Denver, while Wilks was 3 13 in his one season with the Cardinals. Teams also change strategic directions, and are increasingly looking for offensive minded coaches to match the success of high scoring teams in Los Angeles and Kansas City. Some black coaches also get other jobs elsewhere. Bowles, for instance, was quickly hired as the defensive coordinator in Tampa. Still, the N.F.L., where nearly every owner and many top team executives are white, has battled the perception it does not do enough to promote minorities. Under the new regulations enacted in December, teams looking to fill positions must interview at least one minority candidate from a list kept by the league's Career Development Advisory Panel, or a minority candidate not currently working with a team. Teams also must keep detailed records of who they interview, which is perhaps a response to criticism from minority candidates who say they are routinely called, but not formally interviewed, by teams trying to do the least possible to fulfill their obligations. After it was first established in 2003, the Rooney Rule appeared to be having an impact. By 2011, eight N.F.L. teams had coaches of color, the most to that point, or since. Now, it looks like the league has taken a step back, with the number of minority coaches expected to fall to just four. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
DIARY OF AN INTREPID AUTHOR Jeff Kinney is the rare writer who speaks of his work in the collective voice for instance, "We realized in the spring that having a book out in the height of a pandemic might not be the best thing so we decided to delay it." But last month the "Diary of a Wimpy Kid" creator was on his own when he embarked on a nine day tour to promote his new novel, "Rowley Jefferson's Awesome Friendly Adventure," now at No. 1 on the children's middle grade hardcover list. Equipped with a Wimpy Kid mask and an extra long grabber for passing copies to customers, he drove an orange cargo van ("a futuristic ice cream truck") from Pennsylvania to Vermont, braving storms and downed trees along the way. Kinney says the road trip reminded him of his early days as an author, before he started traveling in souped up tour vans, accompanied by a team of helpers: "There was something elemental about getting behind the wheel and driving myself. I was taken aback by how enthusiastic the participants were. Cars full of parents and kids would pull up, ecstatic to have something to do, something that wasn't canceled." Of course, it wasn't all scenic views and adoring crowds. Kinney's exhaust pipe hit the ground during a flash flood in Philadelphia, so he consulted YouTube, got on his back in a hotel parking lot, slid underneath the van and fixed it. "I'll go on record," he laughs. "I'm the least handy guy. I have a pianist's hands." In addition to visiting bookstores, Kinney made house calls to bereaved families and children of frontline workers. He says, "That was really the most rewarding part. It was fun to pull up in a neighborhood in this really brightly decorated van, and sometimes neighborhood kids would run alongside it. Sometimes kids didn't know this was happening their parents had kept it as a surprise so I'd tell them, 'This is what happens if you read a book. The author will come to your house.'" | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
Elizabeth Belin of Columbus, Ohio, faced bills of 48,000 more than her annual salary after knee surgery. One Ohio resident paid 240 a month for health insurance that she later learned didn't cover her knee replacement. Saddled with 48,000 in medical bills, she decided not to get the other knee replaced. "It's been devastating to me," said Elizabeth Belin, who lives in Columbus. The bills totaled more than her annual salary. A Kansas resident paid premiums on a policy for two years, then found out his insurance would not cover surgery for a newly diagnosed cancer. The two policyholders have filed a lawsuit in federal court against Health Insurance Innovations, based in Tampa, Fla., accusing the company of misleading them about the kind of policy they were buying. They say they believed they were purchasing Affordable Care Act plans that include coverage guarantees. But they were sold much less comprehensive coverage that left them vulnerable to tens of thousands of dollars in unpaid medical bills, according to the lawsuit. Their complaints underscore problems with some types of cheaper health insurance alternatives that the Trump administration has expanded. Critics of the government's decision, including the Association for Community Affiliated Plans and the National Alliance on Mental Illness, are also suing the Trump administration over relaxation of rules for these plans. "This isn't real insurance," said Jason Kellogg, one of the lawyers representing the individuals in the Florida case. They are seeking class action status, estimating that as many as 500,000 people may have bought these policies. In an emailed statement, Health Insurance Innovations said the lawsuit was without merit. "We will vigorously defend ourselves against all such allegations," the company said. Proponents of short term plans say they represent an affordable option for those who can't pay for the robust coverage mandated by the federal law. But a recent report by researchers from the Georgetown University Center on Health Insurance Reforms concluded that the lack of oversight meant that "consumers are at risk of being underinsured, with significant financial liability if a high cost medical event occurs." Four states California, Massachusetts, New Jersey and New York have largely banned the sale of these products, and others have restricted sales of such plans, according to another analysis. Jessica Altman, the insurance commissioner for Pennsylvania, told lawmakers at a congressional hearing this year that the state had taken action against eight companies in the last two years for misrepresenting the kind of coverage being sold. In recent months, Congress has become increasingly concerned about consumers burdened by medical debt, putting a spotlight on surprise medical bills. At the news conference on Wednesday, Ms. Belin and Christopher Mitchell, the plaintiffs in the lawsuit, said they had no idea they were buying junk insurance. Ms. Belin, who was recently divorced, had been looking for an Obamacare policy in 2016. She spoke to a sales agent who offered her what she thought was an array of traditional health plans. "He would find me a plan that would fit my budget," she recalled being told. Instead, she was sold a limited benefit plan, which sharply capped what it paid for medical care. Mr. Mitchell bought a similar policy the same year from a broker who promised to find the best plan in Kansas at the best price. He was found to have invasive ductal carcinoma, a type of breast cancer, in early 2018. His doctor told him that he needed surgery, but the hospital where it was scheduled told him that he did not have insurance coverage. According to the complaint, Health Insurance Innovations participated in a scheme involving Simple Health, another Florida company, whose agents sold them the flimsy coverage. Simple Health was recently shut down by the Federal Trade Commission after regulators accused it of being "a classic bait and switch scheme," according to court filings. The lawsuit claims Health Insurance Innovations spent millions of dollars funding Simple Health and was intimately involved in the scripts its brokers used to sell these policies. Customers were told that they were getting a P.P.O. plan, a traditional policy that allows individuals to go to the doctor or hospital of their choice. Many of the websites that consumers visited implied the policies being offered were from brand name insurers. The lawsuit quotes from the scripts being used by the brokers. "What's the point of paying all that money every month if it's not going to cover the most important things, right???" the broker asks. "This plan covers you from Day 1 ...'" Health Insurance Innovations says it was never involved in Simple Health's activities. While the company said it had relied on Simple Health brokers to sell policies and collected the premium payments, it required all brokers "to provide clear disclosure of the information necessary for consumers to understand the policies they purchase," according to its statement. "Simple Health violated the trust of its consumers, its regulators and us," the company said, emphasizing that it was not named as a defendant in the F.T.C. case and was cooperating with federal regulators. The company said it cut its ties to Simple Health last year after the F.T.C. took action against the company. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
LOS ANGELES A recent New York Times Magazine article about climate change and the political forces that have stymied efforts to combat the phenomenon will become an Apple television project. Apple announced on Tuesday that it had bought the rights to a series produced by Anonymous Content and based on "Losing Earth: The Decade We Almost Stopped Climate Change," a novelistic article by Nathaniel Rich that stretched more than 30,000 words and took up an entire issue of The Times Magazine this month. At least a half dozen bidders sought to acquire the nonfiction project. Anonymous Content is a production and management company known for films like "Spotlight" and partly owned by a firm controlled by Laurene Powell Jobs. Mr. Rich, who is working on a related book called "Losing Earth" to be published next year, will serve as an executive producer with Steve Golin, the Oscar winning founder of Anonymous. The "Losing Earth" article recounted how, from 1979 to 1989, a small group of American scientists, activists and politicians tried to save the world from the ravages of climate change before it was too late. The article was produced with the support of the Pulitzer Center and was based on more than 18 months of reporting and over 100 interviews. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
On Thursday night, Jeff Sessions, Rex Tillerson, Scott Pruitt and Tom Price visited Manhattan's Town Hall. Outside, protesters crowded the sidewalk shouting, "No to Trump!" Inside, others shrieked slogans until security dragged them away. As the cabinet members spoke, an apparently liberal audience laughed and groaned and occasionally whooped. Then it rose for a standing ovation. The occasion was "All the President's Men?," a one night only documentary drama assembled from transcripts of the Senate confirmation hearings for members of President Trump's cabinet. Produced by the Public Theater and London's National Theater, it featured such actors as Alec Baldwin as Mr. Tillerson and Aasif Mandvi as Mr. Pruitt, with the likes of Ron Rifkin, Ellen Burstyn and Regina Taylor as senators. (Other actors played those indoor protesters.) If you opposed these confirmations and maybe even if you favored them those January and February hearings were hard to take. To revisit them should have been an event on par with a Novocain free extraction or a forced screening of driver's ed frightfests. ("Red Asphalt: Senate Edition.") But if "All the President's Men?" was not exactly cathartic, especially if you're pretty sure that nothing will ever be cathartic or even O.K. again, it was funny and frightening and sometimes illuminating, a C Span supercut with bite. This staged reading was edited and directed by Nicolas Kent, the former artistic director of London's Tricycle Theater, a space that helped to pioneer "tribunal" drama. It is the first major entry in a slate of coming theatrical works that address the Trump presidency, like Robert Schenkkan's "Building the Wall," Michael Moore's "The Terms of My Surrender," and a stage adaptation of George Orwell's "1984." There have already been a few low budget documentary responses, like "Her Opponent," a gender reversed staging of the presidential debates and "American Scoreboard," another version of the Tom Price confirmation hearings. Here, thanks to the Public's cachet, you had an all star cast, which also included Raul Esparza, Linda Emond, Denis O'Hare, Joe Morton, Bill Irwin and David Remnick, editor in chief of The New Yorker. These performers gave the event interest and a perverse kind of glamour. Sometimes it was a little worrying to see such charismatic actors utter the words of these politicians. To hear Mr. Esparza as Senator Marco Rubio is to think, "Wow, I miss Raul Esparza in musicals." And then, "Oh my god, do I like Marco Rubio now?" That said, some senators are now celebrities in their own right, and when Ms. Burstyn appeared, it was hard to tell if the entrance applause was for her or for Senator Elizabeth Warren or both. Same with the acerbic Bernie Sanders of Mr. Rifkin. Mr. Remnick, one of the president's fiercest news media critics, acquitted himself just fine as Senators Al Franken and Thomas R. Carper, although actors like Mr. Esparza and Ivan Hernandez gave more distinct shading to their multiple roles. Mr. O'Hare delighted in his portrayals of a fawning Senator Orrin G. Hatch and a smart mouthed Senator Lindsey Graham. Mr. Baldwin, a commanding presence and a practiced impersonator, was kind enough to let his own silver coif stand in for Mr. Tillerson's, and David Costabile used his "Billions" experience to offer Mr. Price's half answers to questions about his finances. On the Town Hall stage, which was fitted with tables draped in red cloth and two abashed looking American flags, the first three scenes were trimly organized. Mr. Tillerson's hearing spotlighted his ties to Russia. Mr. Price's focused on a number of questionable stock deals, and Mr. Pruitt's examined his ties to the fossil fuel industry. But the fourth scene, the confirmation hearing of Mr. Sessions, was a trickier affair. Mr. Sessions, back in the news with the firing of James B. Comey as F.B.I. director, is a man with a long career of public service and a grab bag of complicating stances. His sequence was more diffuse, with part of the hearing devoted to questioning his closeness to President Trump and another part discussing his views on immigration and abortion rights. While the other nominees dodged uncomfortable questions, Mr. Sessions mostly answered them. He owned up, with some qualifying, to past controversial statements, which is integrity of a kind. It was also surprising to learn that he and Senator Richard J. Durbin, a Democrat, both pushed for passage of the Fair Sentencing Act, which softened penalties for crack cocaine possession. Details like these helped to make the real Mr. Sessions something other than a cartoon villain or the malign elf he resembles even while accentuating his views on civil liberties. The scene ended with a withering speech in which Senator Dianne Feinstein (Ms. Taylor) implacably detailed what she considered Mr. Sessions's grave unsuitability for the job as attorney general. Verbatim theater of the kind that Mr. Kent practices is rigorous in its form. Only actual words are quoted, typically in the order they were spoken. Of course, C Span doesn't become drama without intervention, so the very act of editing means that choices of emphasis and exclusion have been made. Actors make other choices: It's unlikely that the real Mr. Tillerson paused for a laugh after championing his honesty by saying, "You are aware of my longstanding involvement with the Boy Scouts of America." In performance, the play is respectful of the confirmation process itself and the level of discourse it encourages (at least among the lawmakers), even as it stresses the profound, almost comical impropriety of the nominees' assuming the positions they hold. "This is the best of America here," Senator Bob Corker (Mr. Irwin) said as he opened the first hearing. Really? Yet "All the President's Men?" is not really a crusading piece, like some of Mr. Kent's previous work, chiefly the 2004 "Guantanamo." It's closer to that Marx maxim that history repeats itself first as tragedy and then as farce. But what does it achieve? For Democrats, it will probably affirm fears, frustrations and the opinion nicely articulated by my upper chamber crush, Senator Christopher S. Murphy (Yul Vazquez): "This whole administration is starting to look like a bit of a get rich quick scheme." As for Republicans, well, there didn't seem to be many in attendance on Thursday night. (All members of Congress and the administration were invited, but those who did attend weren't announcing it.) By turning recent events into theater, with appealing actors and familiar story structures, "All the President's Men?" makes the hearings more accessible, but also safer and somewhat distant. This is welcome. Who wants to see a play that yanks the scab from unhealed wounds? Yet the night was ultimately engrossing, not galvanizing. It did not thrust you back out onto the street chanting, "Strike! Strike! Strike!" Or in this case, "Impeach! Impeach! Impeach!" When "All the President's Men?" ended after nearly three hours, the anti fascist group members were still outside chanting. Some people took leaflets. Some didn't. No one seemed to join their cry. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
Q. Can rogue Google app developers still sneak malware onto people's devices with Android app updates once the app has been initially approved as "safe"? A. Keeping deceptive and malicious apps out of online stores in a continuing battle for Google, as it is for Apple, Microsoft and other companies that invite outside developers to create and sell applications through official channels. Scammers have recently added new tactics to get their wares onto devices, like hiding code in flashlight and utility apps and releasing "multistage" malware that shows no initial security threat but gradually updates itself with more sinister software once it is installed. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
If, like me, you find the full tilt art fairs a little overwhelming, the formally ambitious but modestly scaled Independent is a godsend. With just 54 exhibits, many of them solo presentations, arranged over four spacious floors at Spring Studios in TriBeCa, it's like a leisurely all star game: It's not exactly representative of the year in art, perhaps, but it feels as if it ought to be. Black and white is in vogue, from the fair co founder Elizabeth Dee's presentation of Carl Ostendarp's cheerful paintings of the existential void (fifth floor, Booth 22) to Canada gallery's extraordinary onslaught of inky drawings and ceramics by Elisabeth Kley (sixth floor, 20). A London dealer, The Sunday Painter, is making its fair debut with Cynthia Daignault's attempt to capture the American century in a series of small, gray tone oils (first floor, 5). But explosive color is in evidence, too, from exuberant drawings and paintings by Derrick Alexis Coard and Gerasimos Floratos at White Columns (seventh floor, 1) to Clearing's show of vivid abstractions painted on small plywood handball courts by Harold Ancart (sixth floor, 10). And outsider art is well represented, with highlights including Leopold Strobl's colored pencil drawings of pretty landscapes interrupted by ominous mountains of shadow, at Ricco/Maresca, and Kerry Schuss's show of wild sunlit scenes by Aaron Birnbaum (fifth floor, 8). | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
Adding a newer test to digital mammograms can increase the detection rate for breast cancer and decrease nerve racking false alarms, in which suspicious findings lead women to get extra scans that turn out normal, a study found. Millions of women will get the newer test, tomosynthesis, this year. The procedure is nearly identical to a routine mammogram, except that in mammography the machine is stationary, while in tomosynthesis it moves around the breast. Sometimes called 3 D mammography, the test takes many X rays at different angles to create a three dimensional image of the breast. It was approved in the United States in 2011. The verdict is still out on the long term worth of this new technology. The new results are promising but not definitive, according to experts not associated with the study, published Tuesday in The Journal of the American Medical Association. Tomosynthesis has not been around long enough to determine whether it saves lives or misses tumors. Even so, more and more mammography centers are buying the equipment, which is far more costly than a standard mammography unit, and marketing the test to patients as a more sensitive and accurate type of screening. It has come on the scene at a time when the value of breast cancer screening and the rising costs of health care are increasingly debated. About 1,100 of 13,500 mammography units in the United States perform tomosynthesis, according to Jim Culley, a spokesman for Hologic, the company that makes the only tomosynthesis equipment approved by the Food and Drug Administration. He estimated that more than six million American women would undergo tomosynthesis this year. "It is very much taking hold in the breast imaging world," said Dr. Sarah M. Friedewald, the section chief of breast imaging at Advocate Lutheran General Hospital in Park Ridge, Ill., and the first author of the new study. Recent studies have suggested that the benefits of mammography have been overstated and its potential harms understated, but many health groups still recommend it. More than 38 million mammograms are performed each year in the United States, at a cost of about 8 billion. The new information on tomosynthesis is "not going to resolve the ongoing discussions about the overall utility of mammography," said Dr. Barnett S. Kramer, director of the Division of Cancer Prevention at the National Cancer Institute. He added, "In a nutshell, it shows sufficient promise that the thought leaders are interested and so are the people who deal with imaging and screening at the National Cancer Institute." He was not part of the study, but the institute helped support it by providing a research grant to one of its authors. Dr. Etta D. Pisano, a mammography expert and dean of the College of Medicine at the Medical University of South Carolina, called tomosynthesis "extremely promising." But in an editorial with the journal article, Dr. Pisano, who was not involved in the study, said it was still not clear whether women should seek it or clinics should adopt it. She said more research was needed. One concern she raised about the study was that it simply looked back at records instead of using the more rigorous method of picking patients at random to compare types of screening. Hologic, based in Bedford, Mass., paid for the study and had the right to review the journal article before publication but could not change it, the researchers said. In an interview, Dr. Pisano said, "We need to be cautious as we adopt a new technology." She said that tomosynthesis units cost about 500,000, twice the price of a digital mammography machine, and that her university could not afford one. "Wealthy communities can afford it," she said. Hologic declined to provide pricing information for its equipment. At this point, Dr. Pisano said, she does not think the evidence is strong enough to encourage women to go out of their way to have tomosynthesis. She said she herself as a patient would not choose it at this point. The tomosynthesis test costs more than digital mammography and not all insurers cover it. Mr. Culley said that when coverage was denied, some clinics charged patients 50 or so for the extra test in addition to the usual mammography fee. The study analyzed the records from 13 American mammography centers before and after they added tomosynthesis. The researchers compared the cancer detection rate, how often women had to be called back for more scans to check on suspicious findings, and what proportion of the callbacks and biopsies actually found cancer. The project involved 454,850 screenings: 281,187 with digital mammography alone and 173,663 that combined it with tomosynthesis. The exams were done from March 2010 through December 2012. Tomosynthesis improved cancer detection. Cancer was found in 4.2 of every 1,000 scans with digital mammography alone, but in 5.4 when tomosynthesis was added. The researchers also analyzed the results further, to separate the more dangerous, invasive cancers from growths called ductal carcinoma in situ, or D.C.I.S., which are less likely to progress and become life threatening. Again, performance improved with tomosynthesis: Combined testing found 4.1 invasive cancers per 1,000 scans, whereas digital mammography found 2.9. For in situ growths, the rate was the same, 1.4. Adding tomosynthesis lowered recall rates, sparing some women an experience that many find frightening. With digital mammography alone, for every 1,000 women, 107 were called back for more X rays. With tomosynthesis added, the figure was 91. With tomosynthesis, there were more biopsies: 19.3 per 1,000 scans, versus 18.1 with digital mammography. Other findings were expressed in percentages. With digital mammography alone, 4.3 percent of the women called back turned out to have cancer, but the rate was 6.4 with the tests combined. Although tomosynthesis resulted in more biopsies, more were positive for cancer: 29.2 percent versus 24.2 percent with digital mammography alone. "We found an increase in invasive cancers, the ones we worry about, that could be lethal," Dr. Friedewald said. She added: "We're picking up the ones we want to be picking up. Overall, it's very encouraging. We're also reducing the number of people who have to come back." She said it was good news that the test did not increase the detection of in situ growths. Although these can progress to invasive cancer, most do not, and many doctors think the growths are overtreated. The study results were the average for the 13 participating mammography centers. Their performance varied. With tomosynthesis, most had fewer recalls but some had more, and while some had markedly fewer unneeded biopsies, others had more. The variation from clinic to clinic means that an individual patient's results might not match those in the study. "So the balance of benefits and harms may differ," Dr. Kramer said. Tomosynthesis uses more radiation than mammography alone, but the dose is still low and well within limits considered safe, doctors say. Newer tomosynthesis software can cut down on the radiation dose, but the results of that technique were not part of the study. Other countries began performing tomosynthesis in 2008, said Mr. Culley, the Hologic spokesman, and more than 50 now use it. But many restrict it to patients with breast problems, rather than using it to screen healthy women. Companies including General Electric and Siemens, which market tomosynthesis equipment overseas, are expected to introduce it in the United States. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
DONOSTIA SAN SEBASTIAN, Spain In Luis Bunuel's "The Exterminating Angel," one of the canonical European classics that is directly referenced in Woody Allen's "Rifkin's Festival," guests at a bourgeois dinner in a lavish mansion find themselves unable to leave. Supplies dwindle. Tempers fray. Some odd stuff happens with a bear. It's an exaggeration to suggest that, except for the bear part, the situation might be at all similar to that of the jobbing film critic, or the completist filmgoer, when it comes to Allen's late period movies. But then again, it is true that no matter how much, and for what precise reasons, one may long to leave this party one that started winding down quite some time ago a new Allen movie shows up year after year (almost without fail, 2018 being an anomaly). So it's a relief to report that "Rifkin's Festival" is, to the ravenous captive, like finding an unexpected stash of dessert: not substantial and not nutritious, but sweet enough to remind you in passing of the good times you once had, despite all that's happened in the interim. It's not hard to see why the San Sebastian Film Festival chose "Rifkin's Festival" as its opener on Friday. Not since Brian De Palma set "Femme Fatale" (2002) in Cannes has there been a movie so symbiotically linked to a festival, and this time nobody gets robbed in the toilets. Throughout, characters go out of their way to tell each other how nice a festival it is. "This is such a nice festival!" they'll say, often while standing in front of one of the town's many landmarks or pretty landscapes, or in the terrace cafes, suites and grand stairways of the fabulous Hotel Maria Cristina (rooms 475 to 1,775 per night). It would be almost suspicious if San Sebastian were not, factually speaking, a very nice festival. Even so, the ex film professor and struggling novelist Mort Rifkin (Wallace Shawn, one of the more endearingly self effacing of Allen avatars) is not enjoying himself. The surroundings are lovely so lovely that the veteran cinematographer Vittorio Storaro's decision to add even more amber oomph to the images is somewhat questionable when there's so much readily available Spanish sunshine but Mort is miserable. As he tells his therapist in voice over, he only went to San Sebastian to keep an eye on his publicist wife, Sue (Gina Gershon, relishing a better role than she's had in a while). Sue is taking a bit too much care of her client, a hotshot director played with sexy hateability by France's most sexily hateable actor, Louis Garrel, and named Philippe, just like Louis's own director father. Sue and Philippe's flirtation has two effects on hypochondriac Mort. First he imagines he's having heart problems, so he visits a cardiologist, Dr. Jo Rojas (Elena Anaya). "I didn't know you were a woman," marvels Mort, apparently the sole person in existence who has never heard the old "The doctor is a woman!" riddle. He's instantly infatuated, even more so when he discovers she too loves classic film, despises Philippe's movie, is conversant with New York City and is experiencing marital woes. These are caused by her unfaithful painter husband, Paco, played by Sergi Lopez in a fantastic, bottle smashing, self harm threatening parody of the passionate, artistic Spaniard archetype that Allen so embraced in "Vicky Cristina Barcelona." Second, each night Mort dreams vividly literal reinterpretations of the classic films he loves, recast with himself, Sue, Philippe and Jo playing the pivotal roles. And while it's a little strange that Mort's ostensibly obscure and snobby tastes should be represented basically by the top 10 tracks on Now That's What I Call the Greats of Cinema Vol. 1, and some of these black and white interludes are overworked the "Citizen Kane" Rosebud gag is particularly forced a few are pretentiousness puncturing fun. In moments like the "Breathless" "Why are we under this sheet?" sequence, or the "Persona" riff in which Sue and Jo lapse into Swedish to complain about Mort's love of subtitles, there are glimmers of the more anarchic cinephilia of early Allen. Sometimes he even lands an honest to God zinger that wouldn't feel out of place in one of his own classics. In a dream, a rabbi berates Mort for not being observant enough. What would he say to God if he met him? "God? After all he's done, he should talk to my lawyer," replies Mort. "Who but a Jew would think of suing God?" sighs the rabbi sadly. "Who but a Jew would have such a slam dunk case?" retorts Mort as he wakes up. But as much as Mort gets to be witty or catty on occasion on hearing Philippe has won an award in Cologne, he mutters, "Isn't that where Eichmann was from?" perhaps the most salutary and surprising aspect of "Rifkin's Festival" is that he is also made properly ridiculous, and not just in the wistfully tragic register in which Allen's unlucky in love stand ins often operate. Whatever Mort may think, at no point does Jo, 30 years his junior, regard him even remotely as a viable romantic option. Instead, she's just a very nice woman trying to be friendly and professional toward a boring old guy in granddad jeans who keeps wittering on about Shakespeare in the Park while her actual life is falling apart. "Life is meaningless, not empty," chides Death, when Mort finally meets him in the inevitable "Seventh Seal" pastiche. "Don't confuse the two." And as thin on real meaning as it is, "Rifkin's Festival," viewed charitably, is actually quite full of a rueful acknowledgment of the lateness of the hour, and the silliness of an old man applying old man values to a world that's getting younger around him by the day. Dawning awareness of one's own irrelevance is not quite the same thing as relevance, but it's a small breakthrough. And it's infinitely preferable to 2019's "A Rainy Day in New York," in which obsessions and behaviors of a musty vintage were forcibly decanted into an anachronistic Gen Z cast. "Rifkin's Festival" is far less objectionable, and though that is praise so faint it needs smelling salts, with latter day Woody Allen, we must be thankful for small mercies, and this bauble is, at least, a mercy of the smallest kind. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
The editorial board is a group of opinion journalists whose views are informed by expertise, research, debate and certain longstanding values . It is separate from the newsroom. Much of the focus on China in recent months has been over the coronavirus that originated there late last year. But that has hardly slowed Beijing's assault on fundamental freedoms and human rights, from the brutal repression of the Uighurs to choking off Hong Kong's limited autonomy. Congress has acted with admirable alacrity and unanimity to pass tough bills allowing for the imposition of sanctions against the Chinese officials and enterprises behind these outrages. It is now for President Trump, who has shown little enthusiasm so far for tangling with President Xi Jinping over human rights, to use the tools that Congress has placed at his disposal to show Beijing that its transgressions have consequences. The new national security law for Hong Kong is the most current and most publicized example of Mr. Xi's repressive, nationalistic policies. The measure severely erodes Hong Kong's civil and political freedoms, undermining the "one country, two systems" model that China pledged when the British colony reverted to Beijing's rule in 1997. One of the first arrests under the new law was of a protester with a pro independence flag, the display of which is now a criminal offense. As a result, a bipartisan push is now underway in Congress to grant refugee status to certain Hong Kong residents. But while Hong Kong has garnered the most attention in the West, it is hardly the sole, or even the worst, of the Chinese government's systemic violations of elemental human rights. These are among other recent developments: A new report from the Jamestown Foundation has exposed chilling details of official measures to shrink the Uighur population, including sterilization and forced abortions. The report by Adrian Zenz, a leading authority on the mass detention of Uighurs in Chinese prison camps, found that while China has long sought to manage its vast population, the draconian controls in the Western region of Xinjiang were intended "to suppress minority population growth" while boosting the majority Han population through increased births and migration. Natural population growth in the region, the report found, had "declined dramatically." On Wednesday, U.S. Customs and Border Protection officials in New York announced that they had seized a large shipment of weaves and other beauty products that officials suspect were made out of human hair from people locked inside the Xinjiang camp system. "The production of these goods constitutes a very serious human rights violation, and the detention order is intended to send a clear and direct message to all entities seeking to do business with the United States that illicit and inhumane practices will not be tolerated in U.S. supply chains," Brenda Smith, a customs official, told The Associated Press. An American government advisory issued Wednesday warned companies that they risk "reputational, economic, and legal risks" from doing business with companies that used Xinjiang forced labor. More than 50 independent United Nations experts signed a statement last week charging that their repeated efforts to communicate their alarm to Chinese authorities about the suppression of democracy in Hong Kong, the collective repression of religious and ethnic minorities, excessive use of force by the police, detention of human rights defenders and other violations have been systematically rejected, and requests for investigations dismissed. The group called for a special session of the U.N. Human Rights Council to evaluate their charges, and the establishment of an independent mechanism to monitor the human rights situation in China. Researchers at Lookout, a San Francisco mobile security firm, reported Wednesday that China's massive surveillance efforts in Xinjiang, which have expanded to include measures like collecting blood samples, voice prints, facial scans and other personal data, began as early as 2013 with a hacking campaign that planted malware into the cellphones of Uighurs and Tibetans around the world. Of all these horrors, the fact that China is actually seeking to reduce the population of Uighurs a Turkic minority of about 10 million with its own language and culture is especially disturbing. As Dr. Zenz notes in his report, these measures "raise serious concerns" that the policies amount to a violation of China's obligations under the U.N. Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, whose definition of genocide includes "imposing measures intended to prevent births" within a national, ethnic, racial or religious group targeted for destruction. China has sought for decades to control Xinjiang, an arid and mountainous region where the Uighurs and other predominantly Muslim people have long resented Beijing's repressive rule. After the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, China took to justifying harsh measures as needed to prevent terrorism, and in 2014 President Xi used bombing attacks by Uighur militants to begin what his government called a "People's War on Terror." The crackdown has intensified since then, with as many as a million members of ethnic minorities incarcerated in camps for forced ideological and behavioral indoctrination, along with a vast system of high tech surveillance and forced assimilation. According to Dr. Zenz, a 2017 report from a local branch of the Xinjiang Ministry of Justice said the goal of the camps was to "wash brains, cleanse hearts, support the right, remove the wrong." Dr. Zenz's latest report and a detailed investigation by The Associated Press charge that for some time now the campaign has included draconian measures to slash birthrates. These include regular pregnancy checks, enforced intrauterine devices, huge fines, sterilization and even abortions on hundreds of thousands of women, all backed by mass detention both as a threat and as punishment. Having too many children, which usually means three or more, is a major reason people are sent to detention camps. "Police raid homes, terrifying parents as they search for hidden children," The A.P. reported. At the same time, the state has made efforts to transplant people of the majority Han population to the region and to have them intermarry with Uighurs. Last Thursday, the Senate adopted by unanimous consent a bill that would impose sanctions on Chinese officials, businesses and banks involved in the assault on Hong Kong's limited autonomy, and it is expected to sail through the House of Representatives. The week before that, Mr. Trump signed the Uighur Human Rights Policy Act, a bill that would potentially impose sanctions on Chinese officials over the prison camp system. The reaction from China was the usual bluster about "fabricated" or "fake news" and threats of "countermeasures." Mr. Trump's commitment to using these tools of statecraft to change China's behavior, however, is uncertain. In a signing statement accompanying the Uighur bill, the president said he would treat it as "advisory and nonbinding." The day he signed the act was also the day excerpts from John Bolton's tell all book about his stint as national security adviser appeared, with his accounts of Mr. Trump's reluctance to let China's human rights transgressions get in the way of the trade deal he has long sought. Mr. Bolton recalled that at the opening dinner of the Group of 20 meeting in Osaka, Japan, in June 2019, Mr. Xi explained to Mr. Trump why he was building camps in Xinjiang. "According to our interpreter," Mr. Bolton wrote in his book, "Trump said that Xi should go ahead with building the camps, which Trump thought was exactly the right thing to do." Still, the unanimous, bipartisan support for these bills, and Mr. Trump's signature on them, even if unenthusiastic, are an appropriately direct and clear signal to China that its behavior is contemptible and will have serious consequences. What remains is to make sure it does. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Opinion |
The prolific choreographer Lar Lubovitch will celebrate the 50th anniversary of his company next spring with a world premiere and some help from the Martha Graham Dance Company and the Joffrey Ballet. The Lar Lubovitch Dance Company is to perform two anniversary programs at the Joyce Theater from April 17 through April 22. In addition, the dancers will make an appearance at the 92nd Street Y's Fridays at Noon series on April 6, the troupe announced on Thursday. "Wanderers," Mr. Lubovitch's latest work, which is set to choral music by Schubert, will have its premiere as part of the Joyce season. Also on the lineup is a revival of "Men's Stories: A Concerto in Ruin" (2000), one of Mr. Lubovitch's beloved dances, which also appeared on the company's 45th anniversary program. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
WASHINGTON Oil prices are rising. Housing prices are falling. But the Federal Reserve chairman, Ben S. Bernanke, told Congress on Tuesday that neither issue was likely to derail renewed growth. There is growing confidence among policy makers here that the economy is making headway, and that Americans still suffering the lingering effects of the 2008 financial crisis will soon start to feel the benefits. "We have seen increased evidence that a self sustaining recovery in consumer and business spending may be taking hold," Mr. Bernanke said in testimony before the Senate Banking Committee. He added, however, that "until we see a sustained period of stronger job creation, we cannot consider the recovery to be truly established." The remarks by Mr. Bernanke, which have been echoed by other officials, place the central bank chairman in the position of telling Americans that things are better than they seem. The Obama administration, privately optimistic but publicly committed to sympathizing when it talks about the economy, said last week that growth is "not happening fast enough." Republicans worry that the Fed is overstimulating the economy, and they see evidence in the signs of growth that it is time to start fighting inflation by cutting back. "Once price stability has been lost, it's difficult and very costly to regain," Senator Richard Shelby, Republican of Alabama, said Tuesday, invoking the 1980s. Democrats, however, are concerned that the Fed may claim victory prematurely. The stock market is rising, but 9 percent of the work force still cannot find jobs. "As the economy continues to struggle to recover, we should be using every tool in the toolbox to create jobs and spur growth," Senator Tim Johnson, a Democrat from South Dakota who is chairman of the banking committee, said in introducing Mr. Bernanke. The Fed chief said that he remained more concerned that the recovery would falter than that inflation would sneak up on the central bank. He said that both the Fed and independent experts estimated that inflation would remain modest at around 2 percent through 2013, as the economy recovered from the recession. And he said it was too soon to decide what approach the Fed should take after its current round of purchases a total of 600 billion wraps up at the end of June. "Over the next few months we'll be able to make a judgment about whether this economy has enough strength to move ahead on its own," Mr. Bernanke said. Mr. Bernanke also tried to ease concerns about increases in the price of oil and other basic commodities like wheat, steel and sugar. He said that a sustained rise in oil prices could be a threat to the economy, but that the probable outcome of the higher prices was a temporary and modest increase in consumer inflation. Other experts, however, believe the rise in commodity prices is already a cause for concern. Dan Greenhaus, chief economic strategist at Miller Tabak Company, an institutional stock trading firm, said that commodity prices remained an important leading indicator of inflation, and he said that Mr. Bernanke also was sanguine about rising housing prices during the credit boom. "Bernanke runs the risk of appearing too Pollyannaish yet again in the face of changing fundamentals," he wrote in a note to clients today after Mr. Bernanke's remarks. Mr. Bernanke travels to Capitol Hill twice a year to testify about the Fed's management of the economy. Inevitably, members of Congress ask the nation's economist in chief to weigh in on the financial aspects of other issues. He told senators that the federal deficit is the nation's greatest long term challenge. But he rebuffed several attempts by Republicans to secure his support for the proposition that Congress should not raise the debt ceiling the maximum amount that the government can borrow without a plan to reduce the debt. The government may hit the current ceiling, now set at 14.3 trillion, next month. Mr. Bernanke said that the government needed to pay its debts and then reduce future spending. "Not increasing the debt limit is like saying, you know, we're going to solve our family's financial problems by refusing to pay our credit card bills," he said. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Economy |
PICK OF THE LITTER (2018) stream on Hulu; rent on Amazon, Google Play, Vudu or YouTube. This uplifting documentary carries the suspense and drama of reality TV competitions, but it also offers a healthy dose of squeal worthy shots. The contestants in question are five puppies training to become guide dogs for the blind over the course of 20 months. With lives at stake, the matter is not taken lightly: Many pups don't make the cut, and rivalries flare up among the human "puppy raisers." Whether or not the dogs pass the tests, the tenacity of all involved is simply admirable. "It's startling, even inspiring, to see how many humans it takes to condition a fully successful dog," the film critic Ben Kenigsberg wrote in The New York Times. "Every single canine on screen deserves plenty of head pats and naps in the shade." BORDERTOWN on Netflix. Tired of the grueling detective work at the National Bureau of Investigation in Finland, Kari Sorjonen (Ville Virtanen) takes a new job as head of a crime unit in a seemingly peaceful town near the Russia border. He expects a quaint life with his family, but is soon pulled into several murder cases. The second season of this Nordic noir television series, which, unlike the first, is dubbed in English, concerns five new crimes and a twist that makes Kari's life at home just as troubling as his time on the job. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
After Mr. Koons and Mr. Carpenter became friends, a new snowboard was born. Called the Philosopher, it marries Mr. Koons's artistic skills and Mr. Carpenter's technical finesse. In his design, Mr. Koons included a likeness of Plato and a rendering of the allegory of the cave (from Plato's "Republic"). "He wanted to use his creativity to create the best graphic ever," Mr. Carpenter said. "I always thought of myself as a perfectionist. Let's just say, not anymore. He takes it to a whole other level." Mr. Carpenter handled the board's technical specifications, most notably making it a twin tip, meaning that a snowboarder can ride forward and backward. The tail is as wide as the nose. Only 50 boards were made. The plan is for them to be sold, for 5,000 each, at an event in New York City, with all proceeds going to the Chill Foundation. "We've done so many co labels with so many organizations, but I don't think we've ever done one with an individual who had such a passion for the sport," Mr. Carpenter said. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
The staircase leading up from the main floor at the reopened Barneys in Chelsea. With shopping, as with many things, I get it from my mother. We lived in outer Brooklyn in the 1980s actually south Brooklyn and my first memory of Barneys was the name coming out of my mother's mouth like a prayer. It was like someone mentioning the Taj Mahal, or the Berlin Wall or the Death Star: a place too fantastical to be real, one you couldn't even trust a photo to capture accurately. Speaking the name felt like the only available substitute. But it turns out I've been living a Barneys life longer than I knew. When I brought up the reopening of the Chelsea location to my mother a couple of weeks ago, I didn't expect to hear how she had shopped for dresses, shoes and handbags at the original; how she had the first meeting with the photographer for my bar mitzvah there, at the Fred's in the basement. "I was extravagant," she said, shrugging. That was information more revealing than anything 23andMe can tell you. Blame nature, then, for my years of leisurely strolls through the Madison Avenue flagship, the Warehouse Sale, various Co Ops, even the outlets on both sides of the country. Like a bird, I knew my migratory pattern without anyone ever having to teach it to me. Sort of. The new Chelsea Barneys is in part nestled into an apartment building. From the street, you can see only part of it, the floor to ceiling glass doors looking like bulging fly eyeballs. Inside, lights are punishingly bright and walking paths are wide. It's like the airport version of the Madison Avenue store, perhaps more a suggestion of actual Barneys than the thing itself. A circular white marble staircase anchors the center of the store, like a cloud runway or cruising strip. Clothes are condensed into greatest hits batches: men on three, women on two, accessories on the ground floor and beauty below. It's the MP3 to the FLAC file of the main store. An average consumer may not know the difference, but there are small details that don't survive the compression. On the men's floor, there are cute clusters of the themes of the day: lace and florals from Alessandro Michele of Gucci; tie dye and cow paint denim from Saint Laurent, mucho leopard from Dries Van Noten; iridescent tunics from Sulvam. There is a rack devoted exclusively to Greg Lauren Black, a line offered solely in this store that takes the designer's luxe hobo attire and strips out all the color (of which there wasn't much to begin with). Given placement of privilege near the center of the floor is Vetements, clothing made by trash can rave auteurs with exaggerated proportions and grim color palettes. I wanted to feel the grunge, so I tried on one of the green Polizei hoodies, which looked like every outfit I wore in 1992: drab, lightly comic, unfortunately sized. Somehow, though, the Vetements brain trust figured out how to make its hoodies chamois cloth soft. I was reluctant to surrender it, even at 885. In the way that the clothes are compressed here, so is the personnel. The staff to square foot ratio is higher than uptown, and salespeople move with a degree of solicitousness on par with movie fantasy dream sequences. It made me comfortable enough to try on a Loren Stewart hexagonal silver bracelet ( 160) and zipper necklace ( 260), beautiful pieces that reminded me that conceptual jewelry is jewelry all the same. Given the diminished space, there is a ruthlessness to how this Barneys is merchandised. Just as airport stores prioritize the most giftable parts of a fashion line, the same is true here. The ocean of handbags on the first floor is essentially a souvenir stand. Almost half of the women's floor is given over to shoes. (There is a Fred's, though, taking up part of the third floor.) On my last trip to the store, I took it in from top to bottom via the central staircase, ending up in the sparkling white basement, devoted almost wholly to beauty products, with a small corner for men's skin care, and a small outpost of Blind Barber, the men's coiffure mini chain. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
LOS ANGELES Even by today's get famous quick standards, Pop Smoke became hot at microwave speed. He released his first album, "Meet the Woo," last July, and in the months to follow, he collaborated with Nicki Minaj, Travis Scott and others. His second album opened this month at No. 7 on the Billboard 200 chart. He had moved on from his family's duplex in a middle class section of Brooklyn, and, at 20 years old, was living in a rented four bedroom home owned by one of the "Real Housewives of Beverly Hills," with a backyard pool featuring expansive views of the Hollywood Hills. Before dawn on Wednesday, several people broke into that home, at least one holding a gun and at least one masked, according to the Los Angeles police. Someone staying there contacted a friend on the East Coast, who then called 911. Within minutes, the call was relayed to Los Angeles and the police were at the home, but it was too late; the intruders had fled and a person inside had been fatally shot. Pop Smoke's record label, Republic, confirmed that he was the victim. There were no arrests Wednesday, and the police said they were still investigating a motive. A number of celebrities in Los Angeles have been victims of home invasions in recent years, and fans of Pop Smoke, whose real name was Bashar Jackson, wondered whether he had unwittingly provided bait to thieves by posting photos of cash, and his address, on social media. Pop Smoke emerged last year as the first breakout star of Brooklyn's growing drill rap scene with the hits "Dior" and "Welcome to the Party," which became the ubiquitous hip hop song of the summer. A gravel voiced rapper with a barklike delivery, he quickly honed a signature approach that recalled the rougher New York rap of the 1990s. He was scheduled to go on tour in March following the release of his second album, "Meet the Woo, Vol. 2." Just last week, he returned from a trip to London, where he sat for a series of radio and magazine interviews. He had come far from Canarsie, Brooklyn, where he grew up the child of Panamanian and Jamaican parents. A stream of mourners on Wednesday paid a visit to his family home, one half of a two story brick and siding duplex on East 105th Street. A next door neighbor, Jessica Lowe, 25, said that the rapper often carried her groceries up the steps when she was returning home from shopping, and was friendly with her entire family. She said she was "more than shocked" at news of his death. "I thought it was a joke," she said. "Obviously in this world it seems possible, but it's just like, 'Why now?' " Ms. Lowe said. Pop Smoke is one of several notable rappers to have died in the last couple of years. Accidental drug overdoses have claimed the lives of established rappers including Mac Miller and up and comers like Juice WRLD and Lil Peep. Shootings have killed Nipsey Hussle, XXXTentacion and a host of rappers well known in their local scenes. Pop Smoke had had legal problems: He was arrested last month on charges of transporting a stolen 375,000 Rolls Royce to New York from California (he needed the judge's permission to travel to London) and previously had to wear an ankle monitor as part of a court diversion program connected to a weapon charge, which was eventually dismissed. "I was literally wilding for respect," he told The New York Times last year. Even as he was on the path to becoming the biggest New York rap success story in recent memory, the New York Police Department prevented him from performing at the Rolling Loud festival in Queens last October, citing safety concerns. In Los Angeles, he was living in a home owned by Teddi Mellencamp, a "Real Housewives" star, and her husband, Edwin Arroyave. Josh Adams, 35, who lives a few blocks away, came by on Wednesday, looking on as the police blocked the roadway and helicopters circled overhead. "Where he comes from, what he represented, I can relate to a lot of the stories he talks about in his music," said Mr. Adams, a video editor who grew up in South Los Angeles. But Pop Smoke was also musically unique, he said. "He just had this real muffled, deep voice, and you kind of almost end up talking like him after a record of hearing him." Mr. Adams started chanting the hook of "Welcome to the Party." "The vibe, the way he sung the song, it was one of those records and one of the artists and one of those sounds that the world could resonate with," he said. Fanny Jooste, who lives across the street, said she had no idea a famous rapper had been living there, adding that the people in the home were usually quiet. She said she was surprised that the security vans that patrol the neighborhood at night hadn't happened upon the crew in the act. Many of the homes on the road have multiple security cameras pointing at the street, though most, including the one where Pop Smoke lived, do not have gates. Many fans online noted that the day before he was shot, the rapper had posted photos on Instagram showing a stack of cash and a gift bag label with his Los Angeles address. In recent years, the homes of actors, musicians and athletes have become popular targets for burglars. Rihanna, Ms. Minaj, Emmy Rossum, David Spade and the baseball player Yasiel Puig have all been victims, according to ABC News. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
REDWOOD CITY, CALIF. No doubt there are devoted followers of most any automotive make or model, no matter how obscure. But now that like minded enthusiasts can connect so easily online, the clubs dedicated to those long gone marques find it easier to assemble their congregations of the faithful. The unlikely object of affection at the center of one such event in the San Francisco Bay Area was not an orphaned vehicle, but rather an obsolete 6 cylinder engine. The occasion was a roundup of more than 50 vintage Chrysler products, gathered here last month in a parking lot for an unofficial and unadvertised annual event known simply as the Slant Six Gathering. Informality was the prevailing tone: no judges, no trophies, no tickets, no rules. A 5 entry fee was requested to finance the announcements for next year's meet. Even V 8 Dodge and Plymouth compacts are tolerated, though these comprise a small minority and command little attention or respect. One Slant Six owner was overhead disparaging V 8s as "overpowered borderline muscle cars that anybody can build." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Automobiles |
In a modern oven in Pasadena, Calif., this week, yeast that could be as old as ancient Egypt was used to bake an especially aromatic loaf of sourdough bread. The baker, Seamus Blackley, was experimenting with yeast he had extracted from a 4,000 year old Egyptian loaf. He was trying to make his own bread using the same ingredients, and some of the same methods, as the ancients. It turned out well, and Mr. Blackley who is also a creator of the Xbox, a physicist and a self professed "bread nerd" posted the results on Twitter. "The crumb is light and airy," he wrote. "The aroma and flavor are incredible. I'm emotional." Thousands of people responded in a surge of interest that extended far beyond niche communities of bread nerds and yeast enthusiasts, whose interests traverse science, gastronomy and history. Mr. Blackley is a thorough hobbyist. He collects wild yeast from medieval forests, is fluent in the language of ancient grains, and takes close up videos while bread making so his followers on social media can fully appreciate the texture of good dough. And he is passionate about ancient Egyptian history. "It's deeply cool to me," he said in an interview. "I think it's really important, and we owe so much to these ancient people. And often, or maybe always, we tend to think of people living in antiquity as being simple or stupid, and of course that's insane. They were brilliant." Mr. Blackley said he was surprised this week by the enthusiastic reaction to his ancient spores. Something similar happened in April, when he made a loaf of bread using a yeast strain that was said to be 5,200 years old. He had not extracted that yeast himself and could not be sure of its exact provenance. But tweeting about the experience helped him connect with others who shared his interests, including Richard Bowman, a biologist at the University of Iowa, and Serena Love, an archaeologist, Egyptologist and honorary research fellow at the University of Queensland in Australia. Dr. Bowman brews beer, and he got in touch with Mr. Blackley to talk about yeast. It was Dr. Bowman who devised a way for Mr. Blackley to extract yeast strains from ancient artifacts without damaging them. And Dr. Love, who also brews beer, managed to get Mr. Blackley access to the artifacts including ceramics that were once used to make or store beer and bread from the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and the Peabody Museum at Harvard. "I had to submit all sorts of documentation, detail our methods and show that it's a nondestructive analysis," she said. "Once they could see that we weren't harming the vessels, they gave us permission." From there, Mr. Blackley used Dr. Bowman's method to flush out samples of yeast that had clung to the porous ceramics for millenniums. Mr. Blackley also had a sample of actual bread from the Middle Kingdom, which came from the site of a mortuary temple for the pharaoh Mentuhotep II and is now at the Museum of Fine Arts. "There were three loaves there, as offerings, and the building was built on top of it," Dr. Love said. Mr. Blackley extracted the yeast, took that specimen home and used barley and einkorn flour to awaken the sleeping spores. Once they run out of food, yeast spores can go dormant rather than simply dying and stay quietly viable for thousands of years until they are extracted, Dr. Bowman said. There is a caveat: It is not yet certain that Mr. Blackley baked with an ancient yeast strain on Monday. His extractions may have been contaminated by modern spores. So Dr. Bowman is working to verify the samples. "We need to isolate them, sequence them, and compare the genomes to the modern samples and see the genetic divergence," he said. Mr. Blackley said that while Monday's loaf probably did incorporate the ancient strain of yeast, he still considered it a practice round. "I don't understand why everyone is so interested in this, but I'm happy that they are," he said. "It gives us an opportunity to demonstrate good science." Once the samples are verified, he hopes to experiment further with baking styles that mimic the methods of ancient Egyptians. He also wants to fine tune his spore extraction technique. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
Varon's singular visual style bright, friendly and completely zany and her deft, economical writing make this simple ode to holding hands burst with originality and charm. The book's goggle eyed creatures are identifiable as rabbits, elephants, ducks and so on, but they wear clothes, ride the bus, go to play dates and day care. All the while they demonstrate the many uses of hand holding: helping when you're scared, keeping you safe when you cross the street, showing your mom you love her. This world is funny and askew enough to grab and hold a toddler or preschooler's interest, and orderly and reassuring enough to make that same kid feel protected and cared for. 32 pp. First Second. 17.99. (Ages 2 to 6) A girl and her racecar are at the center of this satisfying book, gorgeously illustrated as always by McClintock ("Adele Simon"). "It was a fine evening for a drive," so our heroine zooms right out her window, bushy red hair streaming out of her helmet. She goes through mountains, a desert, a forest and a city, ending up back at her own house, where she settles in for story time with Dad (a book called "Cars," of course). The tone is marvelously matter of fact, about both the girl's feats of driving and her automotive passion. MONTY AND THE POODLES Written and illustrated by Katie Harnett As any owner of a beloved, breed indeterminate rescue mutt knows, dogs can be a good entree into stories about inequality and prejudice. In this beguilingly written and illustrated tale, Monty is a scraggly black and white street creature who stumbles upon some poodles living in luxury at Poodle Mansions. Friendship ensues, against the wishes of the snooty Miss Lillabet. Monty gets a blowout and passes as a poodle, but that just feels wrong. So justice and friendship prevail: The pooches turn an old movie theater into a place where "everyone was welcome." Want to keep up with the latest and greatest in books? This is a good place to start. None Learn what you should be reading this fall: Our collection of reviews on books coming out this season includes biographies, novels, memoirs and more. See what's new in October: Among this month's new titles are novels by Jonathan Franzen, a history of Black cinema and a biography by Katie Couric. Nominate a book: The New York Times Book Review has just turned 125. That got us wondering: What is the best book that was published during that time? Listen to our podcast: Featuring conversations with leading figures in the literary world, from Colson Whitehead to Leila Slimani, the Book Review Podcast helps you delve deeper into your favorite books. WHEN SADNESS IS AT YOUR DOOR Written and illustrated by Eva Eland "Sometimes sadness arrives unexpectedly," this wise, spare book announces. Eland draws sadness as a pale blue blob, rather gentle looking, that shadows a little girl. Lots of white space on each page keeps the mood soothing and thoughtful as the girl tries to figure out what to do. Hiding it doesn't work, but she soon sees sadness as nothing to be afraid of sadness can't help itself, and means no harm. There's lots of useful advice for sad days: going for a walk through the trees, or just sitting quietly together. Best of all, there's the calm reminder that tomorrow, "when you wake up it might be gone." Halfway through this tribute to all that makes a place home, like "a table with something good and the people gathered there," it becomes clear that the family in its pages is moving to a new house. New definitions for home follow "the shirt that smells like your old room" as we see the family singing in the car, and eating takeout picnic style at their new place. Ledyard's ("Pie Is for Sharing") words hit every right note; Sasaki's illustrations are earthy and enchanting. YOU ARE HOME An Ode to the National Parks Written and illustrated by Evan Turk Invoking herds of elk and forests of aspen as well as a kid living in a city, Turk captures the grandness of the very idea of our national parks. With bold, freewheeling painting and equally bold, concise poetry, plus informational pages, he has made a book as majestic and inclusive as its subject. It's about time food trucks took their rightful places in the pantheon of picture book vehicles. In this whimsically illustrated story an innocent taco truck is dismayed to find there's competition for his usual spot: a falafel truck, oblivious to her trespass! Rest assured, Valentine's story is about making space for everyone, even if it's a bit of a squeeze, and enjoying all the goodness the world has to offer. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
If an online exhibition can't replicate the joy and surprise of seeing art in person, it has one big advantage over a gallery show: You don't need to move all the stuff! The artists Julie Ault and Martin Beck have spent the lockdown isolated in Joshua Tree, Calif., where they live with all sorts of art, artifacts and detritus made by James Benning, a filmmaker and longtime professor at CalArts. When the pandemic began, these two artists photographed, cataloged and captioned everything Mr. Benning, their friend and frequent houseguest, had given them, whether it was on their walls or in their kitchen cabinets. And the resultant presentation, hosted on the website of the Los Angeles project space O Town House, is a rare example of an online show that feels native to the web: a slow and intimate house tour that also maps a community of artists. Mr. Benning is best known for his experimental cinema, but the art in Joshua Tree is handmade, modest, tender, and a tiny bit menacing a woodcarving inscribed with "Freedom Club" evokes the isolationist philosophies of both Henry David Thoreau and the Unabomber, who used the phrase as a nom de plume. Some works are conceptual, like three paper airplanes fashioned from 100 bills, afforded artistic status with an accompanying framed legal contract. Others are more practical, like a hand painted house sign. And some, like two random pine cones that the artist brought to Joshua Tree from the Sierra, are not really art at all. Each has been photographed informally, with little light adjustment, in situ in Ms. Ault's and Mr. Beck's ranch house. And they have not been organized with any system beyond chronology. An original abstract geometric drawing Mr. Benning made with his daughter, the artist Sadie Benning, has no greater or lesser prominence in this show than copies he has made of a Bill Traylor painting, a Yoko Ono drawing, an Andy Warhol photograph, resting on the bookshelves or else propped up against a file organizer. These replicas, particularly, affirm that what matters here is less an art work's appearance than its offering or how each object expresses and substantiates an enduring friendship. Photojournalism rules right now. Whether taken by professional photographers or a person with a smartphone camera, pictures captured at protests or in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic dominate our moment. Felipe Jacome's new exhibition, "Caminantes," at Anastasia Photo captures a different, ongoing catastrophe: Venezuelan migrants leaving their beleaguered country. Only, Mr. Jacome started with documentary photographs and transferred them onto bolivars Venezuelan currency using a silver gelatin process. A virtual exhibition of these works can be seen on the gallery's website. Mr. Jacome, an Ecuadorean born artist who also studied at the London School of Economics, says on his website that he began documenting the Venezuelans leaving their country after a little girl who had arrived in Ecuador gave him an origami star made out of Venezuelan money. He began to see Venezuelans with bags, bracelets and wallets made out of bolivars that had become worthless because of hyperinflation. He traveled to Venezuela to photograph the migrants, or "caminantes" ("walkers" or "wayfarers") and even joined a group, traveling several hundred kilometers with them. The works here juxtapose faces of individual migrants with the visages on bills, signifying the aspirations, glory days and current failures of the country. Photomontages are accompanied by short descriptions of the individuals photographed. Fernando, Andreina and Lisette were all traveling to establish a better life for their children. Another migrant, wrapped in a blanket to survive the cold in the highlands, is not identified but he serves as a stand in, as do many subjects in photojournalism, for countless others enduring the same fate. MARTHA SCHWENDENER | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
Lunar Eclipse Seen Around the World William Shatner Is Brought to Tears Describing His Trip to Space William Shatner Blasts off to Space on Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin Rocket Inspiration4 Civilian Crew Returns to Earth After 3 Days in Orbit | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
WBGO, the Newark public radio station, has long been one of the nation's premier outlets for jazz on the air. Now it wants to be a destination for the music online as well. Next week, the station will introduce a revamped website, featuring extensive commentary on jazz its online presence to date has been minimal and will also expand its partnership with NPR as that public radio network's primary source of jazz content. Along with these changes, the station has hired the jazz critic Nate Chinen as its director of editorial content. Mr. Chinen, who has been a regular contributor to The New York Times since 2005, will manage the editorial side of WBGO's website, wbgo.org; work on its signature program, "Jazz Night in America"; and join NPR's stable of music commentators, online and on the air. "This is a new age," said Amy Niles, WBGO's president and chief executive. "What we want to do is create a digital environment that is as potent and powerful as what people rely on us for on the radio." The changes at WBGO FM (88.3) should have little influence on its on air programming, which leans toward the giants of jazz history think Miles, Coltrane, Billie and is the second highest rated jazz station in the country, with a regular weekly reach of 375,000 people, according to Nielsen. (No. 1 is KKJZ in the Los Angeles area, with an audience of about 520,000.) The changes should transform WBGO's presence online at a time when jazz is enjoying a creative renaissance. The NYC Winter Jazzfest over the last week was one example of this energy; another is the popularity of younger artists like Kamasi Washington and Robert Glasper, who have pushed the boundaries of the genre and collaborated with stars like Kanye West and Kendrick Lamar. WBGO, whose annual budget is about 5 million, already works with NPR and Jazz at Lincoln Center to produce "Jazz Night in America," the expansive weekly show heard on nearly 200 radio stations around the country. WBGO will become NPR's "voice of jazz," Ms. Niles said. It will feed online content to the network, and Mr. Chinen will contribute to NPR on a national level. Jazz has been a steady presence on NPR for decades, including shows like Marian McPartland's "Piano Jazz." But its presentation has changed recently, including the end of NPR's weekly show "JazzSet" and of its jazz blog, A Blog Supreme. The planning began about three years ago, when NPR took stock of its jazz coverage and decided to take advantage of its various broadcast and online platforms, said Anya Grundmann, NPR's vice president for programming and audience development. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
But when the Chargers' starter, Tyrod Taylor, re injured his ribs during warmups, Herbert, the sixth player taken in the draft this year, was put in to make the first start of his young career. Despite some early bumps, Herbert kept his cool and nearly helped the Chargers knock off the Super Bowl champion Chiefs. But the Chiefs aren't champs for no reason. They wore out the Chargers defense and won their second straight game to open their title defense when Harrison Butker kicked a 58 yard field goal in overtime to give the Chiefs a 23 20 victory. It wasn't easy or pretty. After the Chargers kicked a field goal to go ahead, 20 17, late in the fourth quarter. Mahomes went to work, leading the Chiefs down the field with quick passes and a couple of scrambles. Harrison Butker kicked a 30 yard field goal to make it 20 20 at the end of regulation. The clutch kicks stand out as the veteran has been hugely inconsistent. He had missed an extra point and was 0 for 3 on field goal attempts before the game winner last week and he missed an extra point in this game to go with his two field goals, which came from 51 and 49 yards. Tennessee sealed the win and officially held off what had been a remarkable comeback from the Jaguars when Harold Landry intercepted a Gardner Minshew pass with 51 seconds left to play. Minshew was electric at times, throwing for 339 yards and three touchdowns, but he was not able to pull off a second straight upset. Given how slowly the Giants started against the Chicago Bears, it's amazing they still had a shot to win on the final play of the game. But the Giants clawed back from down 17 0 at the half, starting with a 39 yard field goal in the third quarter. Quarterback Daniel Jones engineered a 95 yard, 11 play drive that ended when Barkley's replacement, Dion Lewis, scored on a one yard run. The Giants added another field goal midway through the quarter, to narrow the score to 17 13. The Bears missed a field goal just before the two minute warning. Jones then led the Giants all the way to the Bears 14 yard line with four seconds left. On the last play, Giants wide receiver Golden Tate was charged with offensive interference as time expired. The Giants fell to 0 2 while the Bears improved to 2 0. It looked like it might be a laugher in Tennessee when the Titans got off to a 14 0 lead over the Jacksonville Jaguars in the first quarter. But Gardner Minshew does not know when to quit, and in a game that has turned into an absolute slugfest, Jacksonville has tied it up, 30 30, with two minutes left in the fourth quarter. Minshew has not been as efficient as he was last week, but he's been plenty productive, completing 28 of 40 passes for 319 yards and another three touchdowns. That has been enough to keep up with the Titans despite Ryan Tannehill having a nearly perfect 158.0 rating based on 15 of 17 passing for 211 yards and four touchdowns. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
Joseph C. Thompson, who became the founding director of the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art in 1988, will step down from that post near the end of October, the institution announced on Friday. Mr. Thompson spent his first 11 years as director working to open the museum in an industrial complex of brick buildings that had formerly been home to a textile mill and an electronics plant. Most recently he has helped the museum, in North Adams, weather the coronavirus pandemic even as it laid off 120 of its 165 employees. In between, MASS MoCA, as it is often called, became the largest institution in the United States devoted to new art, with 550,000 square feet of space in 17 buildings. In addition to displaying visual art, the museum's programming has included music, dance, theater, film and artist in residency workshops. "After more than three decades as director, it is high time for me to step away from day to day management of the museum," Mr. Thompson said in a statement. "The capacities of this wonderful place, and the great people who work here, are unlimited, and the next director will have endless opportunities to advance MASS MoCA's mission." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
Not even the most starry eyed Europhile would claim that the relationship between Britain and the European Union was ever a love match. But somehow, for over 40 years, they held it together, like a pair of bickering partners who fight bitterly but are still in it for the long haul. Brexit, of course, changed everything. Two new novels reflect on the meaning of this still unfolding breakup. They each dramatize a love affair set against the backdrop of Brexit, using the most universal and gratifying human experience to illuminate one of the most arcane and incomprehensible. Helpfully, the unnamed narrator of Xiaolu Guo's novel "A Lover's Discourse" is an anthropologist. She's able to cast her ethnographic eye over the mystifying natives and try to make sense of their impenetrable customs in this case, the inhabitants of 21st century Britain and their disagreements over Europe. The book reverses the common theme of a perplexed Westerner baffled by the habits and rituals of an Asian country. Transplanted to London, the Chinese born narrator struggles with the city's transport system, tries to find "Brexit" in her dictionary and wonders if London Wall is anything like the Great Wall of China. (In fact, it's a largely notional vestige of the city's Roman boundary). Guo is an unsparing noticer. She paints a vivid but unflattering portrait of her new dwelling in her adopted country: "I stared at the canal. This was the English water, cold, gray and full of deadly discharge. ... Just a few ducks floating by, with their feet trapped in plastic shopping bags." Want to keep up with the latest and greatest in books? This is a good place to start. None Learn what you should be reading this fall: Our collection of reviews on books coming out this season includes biographies, novels, memoirs and more. See what's new in October: Among this month's new titles are novels by Jonathan Franzen, a history of Black cinema and a biography by Katie Couric. Nominate a book: The New York Times Book Review has just turned 125. That got us wondering: What is the best book that was published during that time? Listen to our podcast: Featuring conversations with leading figures in the literary world, from Colson Whitehead to Leila Slimani, the Book Review Podcast helps you delve deeper into your favorite books. The truthfulness and accuracy of Guo's language gives the book mischief and energy. There are shades of Lydia Davis in her carefully etched sentences as she details the ups and downs of the relationship without sentimentality. "Once we got onto the bed, I no longer felt horny," Guo writes. "The bed was cold, the duvet heavy. I was distracted by a patch of bird poo, dried on the bedside window. But we made love." What propels the book forward is in part the sense of suspense that hangs over the nascent relationship: Has our heroine made an enormous mistake getting together with an itchy footed boat lover? But there's also something compelling about the breadth of the world the narrator inhabits. The book moves briskly from the canals of North London to Scotland, Australia, Germany and China. Along the way, it's capacious enough to touch on moments of real darkness, while somehow managing to be mordant, funny and, ultimately, life affirming. The English novelist Nick Hornby's best selling books are rooted in an engaging and funny literary persona. Over the years, his writing has anatomized commitment and relationships with a sharp eye for foibles especially male ones. In his ninth work of fiction, "Just Like You," he focuses on a pair of mismatched lovers: Lucy, a 42 year old English teacher, and Joseph, the 22 year old assistant in the butcher's shop where she buys meat for her two young sons. Stuck for child care and perhaps taken by Joseph's good looks Lucy asks Joseph to babysit for her. This relationship deepens when he fends off her drunken ex husband and forms a bond with her soccer mad sons. It soon becomes clear that despite the age gap, there's a sexual spark between the two main characters. We're in familiar territory for the author: a North London setting, amiable comedy and nebbishy internal monologues about the awkwardness of social interactions. "He found himself wondering whether he would ever go to the cinema with Lucy," Hornby writes. "It was completely possible, of course, in the sense that very small ambitions can be achieved quite easily, if one can be bothered. He could just ask her, maybe after a couple more babysitting sessions." However, age is not the only obstacle. There's another difference tiptoed around in the novel's promotional copy in a way that suggests nervousness, at least on the part of the publisher: Joseph's "of a different class, a different culture and a different generation." "Different culture" here means that Joseph is Black and Lucy is white. How do two people from such different backgrounds manage to transcend their differences? Without too much difficulty, it turns out. As we slip between their viewpoints, Lucy worries about meeting Joseph's mother and Joseph frets about introducing Lucy to his friends, but the actual relationship progresses with enviable ease. Joseph's smart, wise beyond his years, a natural with the kids. The sexual side of things gets underway smoothly: "He learned quickly and within a few days or nights or dates or whatever they had entered a Golden Age." No bird poo or asynchronous libidos here. Even their inevitable setbacks are handled with dignity. In fact, there's no great sense of jeopardy at all, beyond the reader's vague anxiety over whether Britain's most genial living novelist is going to get canceled by an indignant Twitter mob for straying out of his lane. The charm of Hornby's previous books has been the way they balance middlebrow uplift with enough emotional truth to make the fantasy feel grounded. Here, there's something underimagined about the two main characters. Tackling the intractable subjects of race and Brexit, the author seems constrained to make Lucy and Joseph exemplary and consequently rather bland. Though there's a lot of dialogue internal and external we're not permitted to see much. It feels as if the leads have yet to be cast and the fictional world awaits the vision of a director. The characters' thoughts linger on innocuous subjects and hurry past potentially awkward ones. The sex is obliquely described and the question of whether Lucy is fetishizing her handsome young Black partner is raised for an instant, then dashed. She's able to recognize the tendency in her friend: "Would Emma be licking her lips if he were a handsome young white butcher's assistant?" she wonders. But the thought an intriguing one is swiftly dispelled, too uncomfortable for the book's PG certificate world. The novel saves its ridicule for cartoonish minor characters and predictable targets: pretentious art, middle aged white novelists, elderly theatergoers, racist police officers, libidinous middle aged women. While it's never a disagreeable book, it's hampered by a flatness that comes from our feeling that the author has deliberately wired things so the conflict will never rise above a certain voltage. And in the fraught times in which the novel has arrived, its bonhomie comes off as strained and false. Both "A Lover's Discourse" and "Just Like You" suggest that in a time of struggle between seemingly irreconcilable opposites, who hold each other's differences to be moral failings, it might be instructive to consider how humans overcome obstacles in other types of relationships. Guo gives her characters scope to live and suffer, so her book's final affirmation has a hard won quality that carries weight. But, in the end, the child proofed world of "Just Like You" can't tell us much about difficult negotiations. Conflict averse, it seems to endorse Joseph's approach to the Brexit referendum: Check all the boxes so no one has a reason to dislike you. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
Since leaving ESPN in 2015, the sports media pioneer Bill Simmons has notched a series of wins: He started The Ringer, a digital media company with a popular website and a network of about 30 podcasts, and sold it to Spotify this year for nearly 200 million. But earlier this month, an episode of The Bill Simmons Podcast, one of The Ringer's most popular shows, provoked a backlash from staff members. The June 1 episode, titled "A Truly Sad Week in America," was recorded as protests against racism and police violence were growing worldwide. Mr. Simmons talked about the movement with a frequent guest, the Ringer podcaster Ryen Russillo. After Mr. Russillo, who is white, spoke of what he described as "looters" who were "breaking into sneaker shops," he complimented Mr. Simmons on his hiring practices, praising his boss for "the jobs and the opportunities that you've given a diverse group." A writer said during the meeting that not having a black editor involved in The Ringer's N.F.L. coverage had put it in a bad position, the people said. Race has been front and center in coverage of the league since at least 2016, when the quarterback Colin Kaepernick started kneeling during the national anthem in protest of police brutality toward black people. Mr. Simmons, 50, started writing columns for ESPN nearly 20 years ago. He was an early podcaster, hosting his own ESPN.com show as early as 2007, and he helped create the network's "30 for 30" sports documentary series. He also started the ESPN sports and pop culture website Grantland. A dispute with the network's leadership led to his departure in 2015. He started The Ringer with an all white team of founding editors. Some current and former employees said that he had consistently sought to hire black writers. "I was one of the people Bill gave a chance to," said K. Austin Collins, a black film critic who left The Ringer for Vanity Fair in 2018. "I was grateful for that chance." Mr. Collins added that the lack of diversity at the company had played a role in his departure. "I've been expressing sadness over this," he said, alluding to the ongoing problem. "I feel let down." The Ringer has six black editorial staff members out of about 90 employees, according to the union. Three of them are writers. A fourth black writer has been hired to cover the N.F.L. starting in July. Between 2017 and 2019, at least five black editorial staff members left the company. (A Ringer spokesman said that there are two additional black employees, but they are not part of the union's tally because they are paid interns, not permanent staffers.) Mr. Simmons said by email that it had been difficult to hire and retain staff members early on, because The Ringer was a start up competing against deeper pocketed competitors. He also blamed "bloggers and media critics who seemed pretty determined to prove that we weren't financially viable." He added that being a part of Spotify, the audiostreaming giant that became a public company in 2018, would make recruitment easier. Four former black employees, three of whom spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of antagonizing Mr. Simmons, said they often felt uncomfortable at The Ringer. A few of them said that they were sometimes heaped with racist abuse on social media and in online comments when they covered topics that might not have fit the expectations of the typical Ringer reader, including a post on Beyonce. Top editors did little to defend them on social media when they were under attack, they said. The spokesman said that The Ringer has been working to manage writers more thoughtfully and to limit abusive comments from readers. Above all, the four former employees said, it was difficult for black staff members to win more responsibility and visibility at the company especially since late 2017, when company leaders appeared to make podcasting a priority. At that point, they said, top editors started claiming shows for themselves. The outlet's popular Rewatchables podcast, in which staff members revisit old movies, led by Mr. Simmons, allowed for a variety of guests when it started. By the spring of 2018, the ensemble approach faded as the show came to rely more on Mr. Simmons along with Sean Fennessey and Chris Ryan, both founding editors who are white. "The Rewatchables was pitched as, 'Let's get the rest of you participating in podcasts,'" Mr. Collins said. "It very quickly became Sean, Bill and Chris." Mr. Simmons said by email that the company needed to spotlight its best podcasters. "It's a business," he said. "This isn't Open Mic Night." The spokesman said the company was creating new opportunities for young staffers. Some staff members said they were taken aback when a white editor was chosen as the sole anchor for a podcast on "Atlanta," the FX series centered on a rapper and his cousin, played by Donald Glover. Mr. Simmons said in the email interview that the editor got the show because she had conceived it and had podcasting experience. "We don't want to put people in a position to fail," he said. Black employees have appeared as commentators on every episode of that show and have hosted podcasts of their own. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
PARIS The European debt problems that have roiled global financial markets for the last 18 months are showing signs of turning into a far deeper challenge: Europe's second recession in three years. Greece, Ireland, Portugal and Spain are already in downturns or fighting to avoid them, as high unemployment and austerity belt tightening take their toll. But in the last few weeks, even prosperous Germany and France, the Continent's powerhouses, have started to be dragged down, hurt by the ebbing of business orders from indebted countries in the rest of Europe. European stocks continued their latest plunge on Tuesday, as the German financial giant Deutsche Bank, buffeted by the debt crisis, reduced its profit forecast for the year. Investors were also jolted by news that the French Belgian investment bank Dexia might be the region's first large bank to need a government rescue as a result of the current debt crisis. It is not just the Continent's problem. The United States, a major banking and trading partner with Europe, is stuck in its own rut prompting the Federal Reserve chairman, Ben S. Bernanke, to warn Tuesday that "the recovery is close to faltering." He told a Congressional panel that the economy could fall into a new recession unless the government took further action. United States stocks ended up for the day, but had bounced wildly on jitters about Europe and rising fears that Greece would have to default on its sovereign or government debt. The Greek finance minister said Tuesday that the country could continue to pay its bills at least through mid November, after other European finance ministers said Greece would not receive its next installment of bailout money before next month, if then. A downturn in Europe, if it happens, could help tip America back into recession and would undoubtedly ricochet around the world. Europe's banks are among the most interconnected in the world, and the euro is the world's second largest reserve currency after the dollar. A growing chorus of analysts now predict that Europe is heading for an outright recession. "The sovereign debt crisis is like a fungus on the economy," said Jorg Kramer, the chief economist at Commerzbank. "I thought it would be just a slowdown," he said. "But I have changed my mind." Goldman Sachs predicted Tuesday that both Germany and France would slip into recession, although other forecasts are less grim. Already, the euro zone economy has slowed to essentially zero growth. It could stay in a slump, many economists say, at least through next spring. If that happens, tax revenue is likely to fall and unemployment, already high, is expected to rise, making it even more difficult for Europe to address the sovereign debt crisis and protect its shaky banks. In a sign of how quickly the ground is shifting, the European Central Bank might lower interest rates on Thursday just a few months after it started raising them in what is now seen as a misguided effort to stem incipient inflation. In Italy, which has the euro zone's third largest economy, after those of Germany and France, a 45 billion euro austerity program aimed at reducing debt has many worried about a recession. On Tuesday, the ratings agency Moody's downgraded Italian government bonds by three notches, to A2 from Aa2, and kept a negative outlook on the rating. Paolo Bastianello, the managing director of Marly's, an Italian clothing retailer, is increasingly discouraged. At the start of the year, Mr. Bastianello was more optimistic that Europe would escape its troubles and that the government might seriously tackle Italy's problems. "But the turbulence of the markets and the uncertainty about this abnormal mass of public debt just scare people away from buying," he said. Not everyone is so pessimistic. Some German executives say sales remain healthy, at least so far. "We don't see any impact on our business," said Roland Busch, a member of the management board of Siemens, the electronics and engineering giant based in Munich. Bucking the trend almost everywhere else in the developed world, unemployment in Germany continues to fall, and there are shortages of skilled workers in several important sectors. Jens Weidmann, who runs Germany's central bank and serves on the executive board of the European Central Bank, predicted last week that the nation would hit "a soft patch" but escape recession. Commerzbank predicts German growth will slow almost to zero in the fourth quarter of 2011, but not decline. At best, though, it expects Germany to grow by no more than 1 percent in 2012. The International Monetary Fund is a little more optimistic, predicting growth of 1.3 percent next year in Germany after a healthy 2.7 percent this year. The economy is worse in Portugal, which is operating under a bailout agreement with the European Union and the I.M.F. The I.M.F. warned the new prime minister, Pedro Passos Coelho, that Lisbon still needed to find an additional 1 billion euros in budget savings. But further austerity may only deepen the downturn, with Portugal's economy expected to fall by 1.8 percent this year and 2.3 percent in 2012. Joao Figueiredo, the owner of a small ship repair yard in Lisbon, expects his first annual loss since 2002. "There are now many clients who are late in their payments and whose money I will probably never see," he said. The worldwide dimension of the financial crisis, Mr. Figueiredo added, made the outcome even more uncertain. "We're now in the middle of a crisis that started in American real estate and then crossed over to Europe, and it seems really nobody has any idea where this will go next and for how long." Portugal's slump convinced Francois Libner, the president of Libner S.A., a French manufacturer of delivery truck bodies, that it was hopeless to keep trying to sell there. After growth in Portugal, Greece, Spain, and Italy started to trail off last year, he shifted his focus to Germany. Mr. Libner figures it will take at least a decade for any real growth to return to Southern Europe, particularly in Spain and Greece, which he classifies as "a catastrophe." Mr. Libner said he hoped Paris's efforts to bring the country's deficit and overall debt into line with European rules would allow France to keep its AAA bond rating provided that European leaders figure out how to contain the debt crisis to Greece. If that happens, he said, Europe could rebound quickly, as investors regain faith in the viability of the euro union. But if it does not happen, and Europe's banks become further ensnared in the crisis he shuddered at the thought. "We can pay for Greece, but not for all of Europe," he said. If the crisis swells, he added, "we won't have the means to pay for all of this." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Global Business |
Two decades ago, someone dropped a handful of unwanted pet goldfish into a creek in southwestern Australia. Those goldfish grew, swam downstream, mucked up waters wherever they went and spawned like mad. Before long, they took over the whole river. Researchers from Murdoch University believe this scenario, or something like it, is the cause of a feral goldfish invasion in Australia's Vasse River. Since 2003, they have been running a goldfish tracking and control program that involves catching fish along the length of the river, freezing them to death and studying them in the lab. Despite this program, goldfish in the Vasse are thriving, with some fish growing as long as 16 inches and weighing up to four pounds the size of a two liter soda bottle. Goldfish are one of the world's worst invasive aquatic species, with outbreaks also having been reported in Nevada, Colorado and Alberta, Canada, in the last several years. Goldfish in the Vasse River, though, "have the fastest known growth rate of goldfish in the world," said Stephen Beatty, a researcher at Murdoch University who helps lead the control program. If his team gets the Vasse's goldfish problem in order, its work could inform goldfish management efforts far beyond Australia. Goldfish invasions start with a disconnect between how people view goldfish and what goldfish are like in the wild, Dr. Beatty said. "Once you introduce something into a new environment even if it's a cute, cuddly aquarium fish it can have quite unexpected, serious biological consequences." The goldfish is a domesticated carp, first bred in ancient China for ornamental gardens. For centuries, goldfish were prized symbols of luck and fortune. Shortly after they made their way to the United States in the mid 1800s, however, they transitioned from the exotic to the mundane. The United States government played a large role in this, according to Katrina Gulliver, a historian who has chronicled the goldfish. For decades in the late 1800s, the newly established Commission on Fisheries gave goldfish to Washington, D.C., residents as a publicity stunt, handing out as many as 20,000 fish in some years. In a New York Times article from 1894, a reporter jested, "The business of distributing free goldfish to the people of the District of Columbia has become such a tax on the Fish Commission that it appears they must choose between running a goldfish bureau for Washington exclusively and conducting the legitimate work of the bureau." This, and the later practice of giving out goldfish at carnivals, spawned the harmful notion that goldfish are disposable and inconsequential. In fact, when tossed into waterways particularly warm, nutrient rich and relatively stagnant ones like the Vasse goldfish behave in unexpected ways. For one, they look different. Freed from the constraints of a tank, goldfish balloon to the size of footballs. Within a few generations, they revert to natural yellow and brown colors, in place of the bright orange that breeders try to achieve. They are also an ecological nightmare. Goldfish swim along the bottom of lakes and rivers, uprooting vegetation, disturbing sediment and releasing nutrients that trigger excess algal growth. They feed broadly, eating algae, small invertebrates and fish eggs. To add insult to injury, they transmit exotic diseases and parasites. Females produce up to 40,000 eggs each year much more than most freshwater fish species and are capable of interbreeding with other species of wild carp. With no natural predators, a large portion of goldfish offspring survive to reproductive age, continuing a cycle of rampant overpopulation. So how do you get rid of them in a lasting way? Once they're established somewhere, eradicating goldfish is a notoriously difficult undertaking which is why Murdoch scientists recently spent a year tracking the movement of the fish in the Vasse. Their study, published last month in The Ecology of Freshwater Fish, yielded some unexpected findings. For starters, goldfish are long distance swimmers Dr. Beatty's team saw goldfish routinely travel the length of multiple football fields in a day, and even observed one fish that traveled more than 140 miles in a year. For another, goldfish migrate to spawn. That's right, the same fish that are often kept in tiny bowls, swimming in circles, navigate in droves to an off channel wetland during breeding season. It is perhaps a surprising finding for a domesticated species, but the behavior seems to be innate, Dr. Beatty said, and points to goldfish having complex cognitive abilities. "We think of goldfish as not being very intelligent more like furniture or home accessories than sentient creatures," said Dean Pomerleau, an engineer from Pittsburgh. But his family has trained pet goldfish to perform complicated tricks, such as nosing a tiny soccer ball into a net, and researchers have shown that goldfish can discriminate between music by Bach and Stravinsky. (Yes, goldfish can hear they have evolved a bone structure that translates changes in pressure from sound waves from their swim bladder to their inner ear.) A better understanding of goldfish behavior can inform management strategies, Dr. Beatty said, such as trapping fish en masse after they have migrated to their breeding grounds. Meanwhile, to ensure goldfish invasions don't get worse, it is crucial that pet owners get rid of unwanted fish responsibly, said Linda Walters, a biology professor at the University of Central Florida who has helped produce two children's books on the dangers of emptying home aquariums into local waterways. The best strategy is to give healthy fish away, to a responsible aquarium, pet store or hobbyist, Dr. Walters said. In Florida, the Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission takes unwanted exotic pets off people's hands on regularly scheduled amnesty days. If your fish is sick, the most humane way to kill it is probably to put it in an ice slurry. As for whether you should flush your fish down the toilet, experts recommend against it. Not only is there a slight chance your fish could survive a journey through the septic system and end up in the wild, but, in general, it's just not a very pleasant way to say goodbye to Bubbles. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
The longtime president of St. John's University, the Rev. , announced his retirement on Friday, ending a tenure that included successes like soaring student enrollment and campus expansion, but also financial scandal: he acknowledged going on trips with a former dean who committed suicide while on trial for corruption. His retirement comes amid a pending inquiry requested a few months ago by the board of trustees into possible financial improprieties involving officials at the university, in Queens. In announcing his retirement, effective July 31, Father Harrington, 67, alluded to the successful and difficult chapters during his 24 years as president. "St. John's has been transformed and stands today a truly world class global university," he wrote Friday to the trustees, but, "the difficulties for everyone during the past year have convinced me, after much prayer and reflection, that the time to leave the presidency has now come." In the fall, the former dean, Cecilia Chang, was on trial, accused of stealing more than 1 million from the university and using foreign scholarship students as her personal servants. Prosecutors said she had created bank accounts in the students' names in a scheme to pocket tens of thousands of dollars. During the trial, in Federal District Court in Brooklyn, Father Harrington testified that he had traveled several times with Ms. Chang, as part of a delegation from St. John's, to Asia, where they stayed at opulent hotels. He also acknowledged accepting gifts, like a designer watch and suits custom made in Hong Kong, from Chinese businessmen. He testified that Ms. Chang had convinced him that it was customary in Chinese culture to give gifts and that it would be rude to refuse them. Ms. Chang, 59, was found dead in her Queens home a day after she testified in her own defense. The suicide cut the trial short, but the allegations that surfaced in the wake of the proceedings continued to plague Father Harrington, as some students and faculty members questioned his leadership, and support waned. The inquiry requested by the board is focused partly on Ms. Chang, Father Harrington and his chief of staff, Robert Wile. The investigation, according to reporting by New York magazine, includes a look at 370,000 in interest free loans that Mr. Wile received from St. John's and people with university connections. In the wake of the new allegations, the board retained Frank Wohl, a former federal prosecutor, to conduct a review of Mr. Wile's financial and business ties to the university. Mr. Wile submitted his resignation this week; his last day will be June 30, said Dominic P. Scianna, a St. John's spokesman. Mr. Wile, through Mr. Scianna, declined to comment. Last month, 66 faculty members sent a letter to the St. John's board calling for an open review of the allegations surrounding Father Harrington and Mr. Wile, a detailed forensic audit and the creation of an oversight committee that would include students, faculty and alumni. "Because the board of trustees has not been able to meet its fiduciary responsibilities to monitor the financial status of the university and the actions of the administration," they wrote, "we fear the possibility that there has been a 'serious violation of the public trust' as defined by New York State." On Friday, as news of Father Harrington's retirement spread, supporters praised him. "Father Harrington transformed St. John's from a really good university to a great one," Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly said. "As an alumnus of its law school, I've witnessed with pride as Father Harrington strengthened St. John's academically and physically with new facilities and buildings, while holding fast to the Vincentian mission." The board said in a statement: "The tenure of Father Harrington as president has been a period of unrivaled growth, expansion and achievement for our university. He has been a transformative leader." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Education |
For the dancers of the Juilliard School, the fall semester is all about taking part in a creative process. (Spring is the time for learning classics.) Each year, four choreographers, one per class, make new dances from start to finish, taking students along that generative arc. The benefits go both ways: How often does a choreographer get the chance to work with 25 outstanding dancers at a time? From Wednesday through Sunday, at the Peter Jay Sharp Theater at Juilliard, this year's contributors Austin McCormick, Loni Landon, Kate Weare and Larry Keigwin unveiled their works for "New Dances: Edition 2014." Most of them took full advantage of the expansive cast to flood the stage with voluminous dancing and protean spatial patterns, eliciting generous, undaunted, electric performances from their students. The exception came first, with Mr. McCormick's "La Folia," for the class of 2018. With his own ensemble, Company XIV whose popular "Nutcracker Rouge" is currently playing in the East Village Mr. McCormick works in a racy, extravagant Baroque burlesque idiom. That aesthetic might make sense for his dancers, but it translated clumsily to the first year students, who looked more like kids playing dress up in Fritz Masten's costumes than like the sophisticated movers they were. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
Every few weeks, on the way home from her downtown Manhattan office, Rebecca Weinreich stops in at a club in TriBeCa. The airy space is outfitted with comfortable velvet sofas and a large crystal chandelier. Upon arrival, members like Ms. Weinreich are offered a flute of chilled prosecco or a freshly prepared latte. The focus of the club isn't, as one might think, networking or relaxing. Instead, members come to the Wax Club on Chambers Street for hair removal, paying 89 each month, plus tax and gratuities, for unlimited depilatory services. While the salon also offers services on a pay as you go basis, around 30 percent of its clients pay for the monthly membership, which is billed automatically to their credit cards. Ms. Weinreich is one of more than 250 clients who have become members since the Wax Club opened in June. "I just go in and get whatever I want," Ms. Weinreich said. "It's easy. You never think about it." Memberships are becoming more common at grooming salons. Some, like the Wax Club's, are all inclusive. In October, Blushington Makeup and Beauty Lounge, which specializes in makeup application, introduced a monthly 250 subscription, called the Carte Blush membership, that covers unlimited services. It will be available at the company's four national locations, as well as at a fifth branch that opened this month on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. On demand beauty and wellness apps offer subscriptions, too. Unlimited monthly services for a flat fee are available on Zeel, for in home massages, and Prete, for stylings at salons in Los Angeles, Nashville and San Francisco. Another popular type of membership is a discounted package of services with added perks, like reduced prices on products. The Barfly membership at the blowout chain Drybar is one example that has caught on: There were three times as many subscriptions from January to June of this year than during the same period last year. In October, DreamDry, a similar chain, introduced that kind of membership at its two Manhattan locations. While the discounts aren't vast at Drybar's New York outposts, the 80 monthly Barfly membership includes two blowouts, which cost 45 each for nonmembers they offer savings for clients who come regularly. In a competitive environment, both types of membership have become ways for salons to build client loyalty. "You're keeping that customer close," said Beth McGroarty, the research director of the Global Wellness Institute, a nonprofit research organization. Memberships can also encourage clients to try new services. "We found that guests were coming for facials but maybe going somewhere else for massage," said Susan Grey, the regional vice president for spa operations at Bliss Spa, which had a 180 percent increase in memberships in the first half of this year. "We really wanted to make a one stop beauty destination for them." At each of Bliss Spa's 12 locations, a 99 monthly subscription includes a facial or a massage, discounts on additional services and products, and periodic benefits, like an occasional gift with purchase. Although services like blowouts are geared toward women, the membership model in general is unisex. John Allan's, a chain of men's salons, has offered an annual membership since opening in 1988; it costs 950 at the chain's four Manhattan locations. There are currently more than 8,000 members, most of whom come in once every three to five weeks, said John Allan Meing, the company's founder and chief executive. There are others who stop in as regularly as every day for a shoeshine and cappuccino, he said. The growing popularity of memberships is in sync with an increasing demand for salon services that were once reserved for special occasions. In the last decade, Ms. McGroarty said, both men and women have begun to rethink what it means to look groomed and professional. "It used to be just a good haircut," she said. "Now all these different maintenance things are de rigueur you just have to do them. For more and more people, it's a part of their routine, on the way to work or on the way to a meeting, so the membership model makes even more sense." Making a continuing financial commitment to a salon is also an incentive for clients to book services. "It's like paying in advance for SoulCycle," Ms. Weinreich said. "If I've paid for it, I know I have to go a lot more." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
Tansel Akzeybek, left, and Vera Lotte Boecker at the top of the stairs in "Fruhlingssturme," onstage in Berlin for the first time since its premier in the twilight of the Weimar Republic. BERLIN It was an evening in late January 1933, not long before Hitler was sworn in as the German chancellor, when Jaromir Weinberger's operetta "Fruhlingssturme" ("Spring Storms") had its premiere. The coming political turmoil was not lost on the show's predominantly Jewish creators, who wrote jokes that winkingly alluded to the Brown Shirts, the Nazi storm troopers, even as they carried torches down the street nearby. People in the audience must have loved what they saw; they cheered on the operetta's star, Richard Tauber, through several encores of his big aria. Shellac recordings spread the score's hits, sung by Tauber and the soprano Jarmila Novotna. But "Fruhlingssturme" was open for only 10 days before Hitler took power, effectively ending the Weimar Republic the brief but troubled period of German history that also brought about a golden age of artistic and sexual liberation, even onstage in Berlin's operettas. Operetta a form that evolved from the bawdy shows of Offenbach's Paris to turn of the century Vienna and Weimar Berlin has had something of a renaissance in recent years, with Mr. Kosky as its patron saint. His rediscoveries of works by composers like Paul Abraham and Emmerich Kalman, and now Weinberger, will go down as the defining project of his tenure at the Komische Oper, where he has been the artistic director since 2012. In an interview, Mr. Kosky was insistent on referring to operettas of the Weimar era as a specifically German art form not Jewish (though they were produced, written and performed almost entirely by Jewish artists) or even German Jewish. "These pieces," he said, "should be as much a part of German culture as 'St. Matthew Passion.'" Operettas that premiered in Berlin during the 1920s and early '30s were a departure from their Viennese predecessors: more urban, more influenced by American jazz. They were subversive politically, sexually and racially. They were also a commercial art form, much like Broadway. But under Nazi rule, theater became subsidized and regulated. Many of the artists who thrived in Weimar Berlin simply left. Some would go on to revolutionize midcentury American culture; others failed to ever regain their footing. In Germany, though, operetta remained only as a soulless shadow of itself. "Afterward it got boring," said Ulrich Lenz, the Komische Oper's dramaturge, "and then came morality, which is really strange." For example, in Abraham's "Ball im Savoy" one of the most beloved operettas in the Komische Oper's repertoire a wife decides that since her husband betrayed her, she is free to do the same to him. Later in the 1930s, plots like this were banned, in favor of depictions of more "ideal" German couples. When operettas enjoyed a resurgence after World War II, they were desexualized, sunny and hardly subversive. And singers approached the music like it was lyric opera. "It wasn't bad enough that the Nazis erased this, but they also Aryanized the music in the '50s," Mr. Kosky said. "It's like if Anna Netrebko sang Poppea. If your voice is not a Baroque voice, why would you do that?" Some music from the Weimar era was lost; for a long time, it was thought that Weinberger's full score for "Fruhlingssturme" had been destroyed in World War II. But, as Mr. Lenz and other researchers found, it couldn't have been: There was a Czech performance and broadcast in 1947. So, when Mr. Kosky and his team decided to mount a production for the Komische Oper working at that point from nothing more than old recordings and a piano vocal score they turned to the broadcaster to see whether the orchestral parts existed somewhere in its archive. But nothing turned up. The Komische Oper eventually commissioned a re orchestration, by Norbert Biermann. It's always a tricky art, but even more so in the case of "Fruhlingssturme": The piano vocal score had instrumental cues, and extant recordings offered only some suggestions. Weinberger's previous scores weren't necessarily helpful, either. He is best known for the opera "Schwanda the Bagpiper," whose music doesn't bear much resemblance to the almost postgenre eclecticism of "Fruhlingssturme" in which you might hear echoes of Smetana, Strauss and jazz all within the same aria, the whole deftly navigated on Saturday by the conductor Jordan de Souza. The story, too, mixes moods: It's an espionage thriller set during the Russo Japanese War, yet there are elements of romantic comedy and show tune spectacle. (And, because this is operetta, war won't stop a wealthy widow from throwing a ball.) Unlike most other shows of the time, its ending is more bittersweet than tidy and joyous. I'm not sure whether, on balance, this makes for an entirely successful show. After all, being the last operetta of the Weimar Republic doesn't make "Fruhlingssturme" inherently good; it just confers on it the unhappy honor of having opened just days before the Nazis took hold. It is, though, an invaluable addition to the Komische Oper's repertoire, especially as the company's first Weinberger work. ("Schwanda" is coming later this season.) | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
Rebecca Wei, the head of Christie's Asia, has announced that she will leave the auction house just eight months after being appointed its chairwoman. Ms. Wei began working with the auction house in 2012, when she was hired as the general manager of Christie's Asia. She was named president in 2016, and appointed chairwoman in December 2018. "I am immensely proud of the growth that has been achieved during my time with Christie's, in regional sales as well as Asian contribution to Christie's global revenue," Ms. Wei said in a statement. "Our collaboration with collectors has helped to spearhead Asia to the forefront of the global art industry." The move comes at a challenging time for the Asian art market. According to Artnet, total auction sales across Asia dropped 11.7 percent in the first half of 2019 compared to January through June of last year. The United States China trade war has also contributed to economic uncertainty in the art world, particularly when it comes to Chinese art. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
"The Dolomites have all the greatness of Italy, but transported to the mountains," says Massimo Bottura, a habitual visitor to his country's sharp summited, northern territory in the Alps. The chef of Osteria Francescana in the small north Italian town of Modena, which topped the 2018 World's 50 Best Restaurants list, Mr. Bottura has little interest in schussing down the area's famously seductive slopes. "I hate to ski," he admits. "But I love the kind of eating on offer in the mountains." Lara Gilmore, his wife, business partner, and (unlike Mr. Bottura) an irrepressible ski enthusiast, insists they get there often enough to appease both of their appetites. Here, Mr. Bottura shares his five favorite places, on and off piste to eat in the Dolomites. St. Hubertus, which is run by Mr. Bottura's friend, the star chef Norbert Niederkofler, is like Osteria Francescana, one of the few restaurants in the world to be awarded three Michelin stars yet it's the informal affability of the staff that feels most familiar to Mr. Bottura. "It's that super friendly Italian approach we like simple, not stiff," he says. "And watching Norbert at work in the open kitchen, and eating his special mountain flavors it can change your entire vision of life." While the peaks are gastronomically anchored by this long running restaurant, Mr. Bottura notes that it was Mr. Niederkofler who "pushed these small mountain lodges to become ambitious restaurants." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
Checking into a hotel and sleeping in the same room for your entire stay might be the norm but is undoubtedly routine. Travelers looking for variety can now have it. Some properties are giving their guests a chance to spend a night or more in secluded lodgings. The upscale Hotel Rosa Alpina in the Dolomites of Italy, for example, has a small cabin at an altitude of 6,000 feet with no electricity or hot water. Guests reach it from the main hotel by hiking, mountain biking or car and arrive in time to catch the sunset. A dinner of grilled meats and vegetables, cheeses and wine either prepared on their own or with the help of a hotel chef follows. Prices from 650 euros (about 730) a night, which includes accommodations and dinner with wine. "There is something to be said about getting away from the creature comforts and being surrounded by stillness and stars," said the hotel's owner, Hugo Pizzinini. The Gstaad Palace in Gstaad, in the Swiss Alps, has the Walig Hut, a mountain farmhouse that's reachable by a two to three hour hike. Along the way, guests take in views of the snow covered peaks and lush green valleys. At the hut they're greeted by one of the hotel's chefs, who will cook them dinner. Prices from 1,560 a night with dinner. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
Prominent right wing media commentators have sought for weeks to cast aspersions on the House impeachment inquiry into President Trump, echoing the president's repeated cries of "witch hunt!" and framing the investigation as motivated by political bias. Now some of those commentators have opened a new front: questioning the patriotism of Lt. Col. Alexander S. Vindman, the White House national security official and decorated Iraq war veteran who was testifying on Tuesday that he had heard Mr. Trump ask Ukraine to investigate his Democratic political rival. One pundit on Fox News went as far as to suggest that Colonel Vindman had engaged in "espionage" against the United States, prompting an unusual rebuke from a Republican member of Congress. Colonel Vindman, who received a Purple Heart after he was wounded in Iraq, is a Ukrainian American immigrant who was 3 years old when his family fled to the United States. On her Fox News program on Monday, the conservative host Laura Ingraham sought to turn his ethnic background against him, noting that Ukrainian officials had recently sought the colonel's advice about interacting with Mr. Trump's personal lawyer, Rudolph W. Giuliani. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
It is difficult, at first, to see the 12 year old boy of the photograph in the middle aged man on the stage. They are both in our line of vision for the entirety of the Barrow Group's revival of Martin Moran's beautiful and harrowing "The Tricky Part," which opened on Sunday night, and it's impossible not to compare them. The beaming, round cheeked kid in the framed picture it is spotlighted on a small table when the audience arrives exudes an intoxicating innocence. He is in a kayak, hoisting an oar above his head, and his delight seems as radiant as sunshine. It's one of those images that make people pine for their preadolescent years, when pleasure could be taken simply, thoughtlessly. The man that boy has become is lean, angular and painstakingly thoughtful, with the polished charm of a professional raconteur. That's Mr. Moran, the writer and entire cast of "The Tricky Part." He is here to commune and connect with the smiling subject of the photograph, who had just been coerced into a relationship with a 30 year old man who took this very picture that would define and maim the rest of his life. In the 14 years since I first saw Mr. Moran perform "The Tricky Part," the memoir of sexual abuse has become an increasingly crowded genre in literature and theater. Yet this account of a Roman Catholic boyhood interrupted and derailed retains a luminous, novelistic complexity that sets it apart from similar tales of stolen childhoods. It is, in its way, a mystery story, in the richest sense. We know, soon enough, all the whos, whats and wheres of the crime committed here. But there is no simple formula to explain the why behind it, or its endless repercussions. As Mr. Moran notes, wondering how to describe his connection to the man who was his lover if that is indeed the word for three years, "Definitions fail, bleed one into the other." Such troubling ambiguity is scarcely in evidence in the opening of moments of "The Tricky Part," directed with delicacy and deliberation by Seth Barrish. The house lights are left on when Mr. Moran takes the stage. He registers at first as an amiable host with an amusing line of patter about growing up Catholic in Denver. He asks if there are people with a similar background in the audience, and proceeds with anecdotes about schoolteacher nuns and priests, both censorious and inspirational he presumes will be familiar to them. But in these ostensibly blithe stories, Mr. Moran is describing a worldview, as well as a world, that informs every aspect of the story that follows, and it is equally steeped in guilt and wonder. The expected eccentric nun recollections are never merely amusing character sketches. They percolate quietly with the sense that people are ultimately unknowable, and a fierce, cartoonlike schoolteacher, Sister Agatha, becomes a figure whose dramatic disappearance from her students' lives is never explained. Even the surrounding Colorado landscape, which exists in what is called, in geographic terms, "a disturbed region," seems neither solid nor enduringly fixed. Mr. Moran quotes one of his science teachers, a German Irish priest, as saying, "A rock, a mountain may look at rest, but they most certainly are not. Everything is filled with ceaseless subatomic motion." That's a good description of how "The Tricky Part" operates in performance. (Mr. Moran used the same material as the basis for his 2005 book of the same title, but the story's insistence on the simultaneity of past and present only deepens when experienced live, in real time.) As agreeably comfortable as the show feels in its opening moments, there is also a sense that the straightforward narrative here is being tugged at and undermined by forces we don't grasp yet. A silence always yawns beneath the chatter, and as an actor, Mr. Moran makes sure we acknowledge and respect what is unspoken and perhaps undefinable. The lights have been growing dimmer, without our really knowing it, as Mr. Moran keeps talking. (Elizabeth Mak's lighting is essential to the production's power.) And when he finally tells us about the night that Bob a camp counselor and Vietnam veteran took the 12 year old Martin into his sleeping bag in a mountain ranch house, the theater is almost entirely dark. Only Mr. Moran's face is illuminated. And at that moment, there is no question that it is also the face of the boy in the picture. It is not the face of a victim or not merely that but of someone experiencing a kind of horrible apotheosis that feels absolutely natural and deeply, totally wrong. That's a dangerous contradiction to live with. Mr. Moran assesses the damage his relationship with Bob inflicted on his life in brief, blunt references to two suicide attempts, years in therapy and a period of being "sexually compulsive." With an artist's appreciation of reticence, he doesn't need to say more. When Mr. Moran was 42, he got in touch with Bob, by then a resident of a veteran's hospital in Los Angeles. His account of their meeting takes place in sunlight. Bob has changed from the strapping, athletic figure the young Martin once knew into a white haired invalid "who looks to be somebody's grandmother." That does not mean the older man no longer has a grip on the younger one. I won't tell you what they say to each other, except to note that it is both commonplace and shocking, as tragedy tends to be when it's embedded in the pedestrian details of everyday life. It is not a scene of resolution or closure or even full explanation. The final image finds Mr. Moran looking once again at the 12 year old in the picture. Four decades after the photograph was taken, and 14 years after "The Tricky Part" was first staged, the dialogue between the two continues with full eloquent and ambivalent force. It is unlikely to end ever. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
On a Monday morning in early December I drove a rental car out of Des Moines and eventually made my way down a slender country road that cut a forthright path through cattle pastures and cornfields not yet glazed by snow. My destination was Winterset, the county seat of Madison County, whose covered bridges Robert James Waller immortalized more than 20 years ago in his best seller, "The Bridges of Madison County." Mr. Waller's treacly love fable is not my personal favorite, but I confess to detouring at the sign for Hogback Bridge and being stirred by the lonely spectacle of that wooden sentry crouched over the North River in an unprepossessing crease of Middle America. My reasons for visiting Winterset, however, were more political than sentimental. Donald Trump had descended on the town a few months back, reportedly making a "yuuge" impression on the local Republican kingmakers, and also wowing a gathering of working class locals with the promise that if elected president his hairstyle would most likely be a casualty, as he would be too busy "working my ass off" to fuss with it. The venue for Mr. Trump's remarks had been the John Wayne Birthplace and Museum, which another presidential candidate, Rick Santorum, would soon be visiting. I wasn't so much interested in joining Mr. Santorum's "Take Back America" tour as I wished to bask in the magnetic force that Winterset's favorite son, the former Marion Michael Morrison, exerted on political hopefuls. And so I conducted my own hourlong tour of the small but strangely affecting museum, with its fake blood stained cowboy costume and movie posters of blockbusters ("True Grit") and duds ("Big Jake") alike. Tender and affable though the sendup was, the myth being evoked that of the rugged individualist galloping to the world's rescue remains as politically potent as any in America. It's again that season, occurring once every four years, when men and women who imagine themselves as the next president of the United States are obliged to make their case to the public in quiet swaths of America's midsection that they would otherwise never deign to visit. Accompanying these candidates are campaign strategists and members of the political press who themselves are strangers to what some sneeringly refer to as "flyover country." The collision of the two worlds is often abrupt and ghoulish diners under siege, a crazed network of boom mikes, a staged "moment" in search of actual momentousness. But it can also be salient, an opportunity for the nation's elite to confront their own ignorance as they see the expressions and hear the stories of people whose ordinary lives are directly affected by the bloodless everyday machinations of Washington. This ritual encounter begins in Iowa blessedly so, I might add, despite the frequent lament that the state's Republican voters are too conservative, that its caucus system is too arcane and exclusionary. Let's put all that to the side for the moment. Iowa is not just a reminder that America is more than the sum total of its skyscrapers and safe spaces. It also reaffirms that our nation, beginning with Iowa, is full of unsung surprises. Des Moines is also the Continental, a dark and dignified restaurant around the corner from Raygun in the city's East Village. I spent a recent evening there sipping a whiskey and egg whites based drink called the Filibuster with the G.O.P. communications specialist Tim Albrecht formerly with Mitt Romney in 2008 and 2012, now with Jeb Bush while he wistfully recalled Mr. Romney's last campaign rally before Election Day: "Ten thousand people waiting for him at the airport. We thought we had it in the bag." And Des Moines is Carl's, a boisterous dive in the Sherman Hill neighborhood where Ronald Reagan once lived while working as a sportscaster for WHO Radio. Both the bar and the neighborhood are nowadays heavily populated by Democrats, I was told by a member of the loyal opposition, a longtime Iowa G.O.P. strategist named Grant Young, whom I found beside a steaming pot of chili drinking a Coors Light with a shot of whiskey and cinnamon and who, in midexplanation, fist bumped an arriving patron, Matt Paul, the state director of Hillary Clinton's campaign. I woke up the next morning after that boozy evening and shuffled over to the edge of downtown, where Carly Fiorina was conducting a town hall in the conference room of an insurance company. The candidate's "Blueprint to Take Our Country Back" would prove to be and I say this with gratitude the lightest fare of the day. Iowans are great innovators when it comes to caloric multiplier effects. In the town square of Oskaloosa later that morning, I stopped for a latte at Smokey Row Coffee, a theatrical cafe where, above one special table, an actual movie marquee announces who is sitting directly beneath it. ("Happy birthday, Senator Grassley!") The soup of the day was cheeseburger chowder literally, a burger half submerged in a small ocean. I forewent this delicacy because I knew I would soon be having lunch in Iowa City, at the famed Hamburg Inn No. 2, a scruffily hip diner festooned with they were here photos of candidates Bill Clinton, Barack Obama and others. My server there advised me to follow my cheeseburger with something called a pie shake "Try the pumpkin, it's in season." True to its description, the experience was akin to drinking a pumpkin pie, complete with crust. Just outside Iowa City, in the sleepy town of West Branch, is the presidential museum of its native son Herbert Hoover. The tourist site, housed in a building not far from the two room cottage where Hoover spent his earliest days before becoming orphaned at the age of 9, is notable for its sparseness. Unlike the edifices dedicated to more recent or more beloved presidents, a visitor can stroll through the life of our nation's 31st chief executive without anyone else around, lending poignancy to Hoover's experience as the man widely blamed for failing to prevent the Great Depression. To its credit, the museum devotes significant space to Hoover's fall from grace following his landslide loss to Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1932, and subsequent despondency, while reminding visitors that he ultimately regained his status as a statesman, working with President Harry S. Truman to help resuscitate Europe's economy following World War II. Here in Iowa was another great national motif that of America as the land of second chances. I was now in the eastern side of the state, with no set itinerary. As a native Texan, I am not one for driving in snow. But the weather was merciful and the rural roads well paved, offering a near seamless tableau of shorn acreage upon which the occasional silo or farmhouse materialized in a state of heartbreaking isolation. Just outside Kalona on Route 1, I came upon a profusion of buggies ferrying Amish families. But traffic was otherwise nonexistent, and so I made my way unharried, in a kind of fugue state, until a beeping notified me that I was almost out of gas. I had just enough to get me to tiny Keota where, at the town's one high school, Martin O'Malley was describing trickle down economics to a mildly interested crowd of about 200. A reporter for the local paper told me where to find the nearest gas station, adding with a sweet smile, "I know it means a lot to the folks who organized this event that you came all this way." A few minutes later, as I meandered through Keota, she flagged me down on the street and gently advised me that I would find what I was looking for in the opposite direction. Less than an hour from Keota, I found the turnoff to Vedic City or, rather (as a sign proclaimed it), "Maharishi Vedic City: Capital of the Global Country of World Peace." Iowa, as it turns out, boasts one of America's foremost Transcendental Meditation temples, shimmering on the plains like an alien spaceship. The filmmaker David Lynch was a habitue; Oprah Winfrey had paid a visit; Jim Carrey gave a commencement speech to the 2014 graduating class at Maharishi University of Management in Fairfield. The community's other main attraction is the Raj, a rather sumptuous spa where the ancient healing rites of Ayurveda are practiced. I was tempted to book a room, but the Raj requires a three day commitment, and with my reporter's laptop and ever buzzing iPhone, I seemed a dubious fit anyway. Instead, I found a hotel in neighboring Fairfield, a new agey city ominously self described in one sign as "a cast of 10,000 as themselves." Ron Paul, I was later told, had a strong following in Fairfield. Western Iowa's unofficial corn corridor is Route 141, an Uberless world of uneven cellphone reception and agrarian infinity, gorgeous in its forlornness. In Coon Rapids, a quiet town of 1,300 astride the Middle Raccoon River, I went searching for the farm that an agriculturally curious Soviet premier, Nikita S. Khrushchev, came to visit in 1959. After a few fruitless turns, I pulled into the main square and walked into the newspaper office of the Coon Rapids Enterprise. A yellow Labrador puppy joyfully assaulted me as I walked in. "That's Margaux," the paper's editor, Charlie Nixon, informed me as he restrained his pet. "We name all of our dogs after wines we can't afford." The newsroom's walls featured several vintage photos of prominent Iowa politicians, which Mr. Nixon narrated for me with a string of appropriate profanities. He then showed me a framed photo of the bald Soviet leader standing beside a white haired farmer. "Roswell Garst owned a big seed company," he said, adding that the Iowan had visited the U.S.S.R. to study its farming techniques at the behest of Khrushchev, who shared Mr. Garst's interest in preventing famine. The editor directed me to the old Garst farmstead, a rustic, two story, wood framed structure on a 5,000 acre land trust that is now a bed and breakfast replete with plaques and photographs memorializing the rather astounding 1959 summit of the Garst and Khrushchev families, one that had earned Mr. Garst the epithet of "Communist sympathizer" rather than the capitalist visionary he actually was. Like the Maharishi temple in Vedic City, the Garst property utterly belied the political caricature of Iowa as an ecosystem of rural rigidity. A few miles west of Coon Rapids, another wrinkle in the Iowa tapestry came into view: Templeton, home of one of the country's most skilled Prohibition era bootleggers, so goes the legend. Near the little town's center, I beheld a Christmas tree made entirely of whiskey barrels and realized that I had discovered the tasting room of Templeton Rye. The walls inside its handsome tasting room were covered with old newspaper articles describing how Al Capone favored the smooth moonshine crafted by this community of farmers, who had apparently turned to the illegal pastime when corn prices went south. Today, Templeton Rye's bottles bear the signature of Deirdre Capone, the mobster's grandniece who has a promoting agreement with the company. "We don't dabble in politics just in our right to make whiskey," the tasting room operator, Lisa Halbur, proclaimed as she poured me a shot of the now legal stuff. That right, she admitted, was still prohibited in the "controlled state" of Iowa. As a result, her company's whiskey is in fact distilled in Lawrenceburg, Ind., and later bottled in Templeton. "I guess we could use a good lobbyist," Ms. Halbur said. I asked her if there was anyplace else in Templeton where one could find remnants of Iowa's bootlegging trade. Her answer led me to a small cemetery outside the town's one Catholic church. After wandering among the graves for a few minutes, I discovered the attraction in question. It was a monument to a former parish priest, a Father Schulte, with a little door on the tombstone featuring a chalice into which one would ordinarily place candles and pictures of the Virgin Mary ... but which in Templeton was where customers knew to look to find their treasured bottle of hooch. I returned to my day job, and to the suburbs of Des Moines, that afternoon. Hillary Clinton would soon be hosting a town hall in Urbandale, and denouncing Mr. Trump's denunciation of Muslim refugees to an overflow crowd, just a few hundred yards from where I had begun the day dining on pecan pancakes among a gathering called the Westside Conservative Club, while those present grilled the speaker, a Republican mayor, about his tax cuts. (Short version: He could stand to cut more.) After Mrs. Clinton fielded a few softball questions with a shortstop's aplomb, I headed off to dinner to meet with a G.O.P. strategist, then to quiz a prominent local Democrat at Wellman's, a watering hole that in the previous two cycles was legendarily overstuffed with Obama campaign staffers. The Democrat in question was as skilled a storyteller as he was proficient a drinker. Still, I had an early flight to catch the next morning, to that other early decider in the presidential sweepstakes, New Hampshire a state that is much remarked on by the political class for its flinty local interrogators and for the pride they seem to take in negating the referendum delivered by Iowans a week earlier. But as I drove back to my hotel that night, I could not stop thinking of the many quirks I had encountered throughout my week in Iowa: a self made cowboy, a remade statesman, a farmer who welcomed the world's leading Communist into his home, Maharishi followers and bootleggers, pie shakes and cheeseburger chowder. This was the Iowa I had not known, the America I knew in my bones was there all along. Its votes came first for good reason. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
In the biblical story of the Tower of Babel, mankind's coordinated efforts to build a tower to heaven are thwarted by the divinely sent obstacle of mutually incomprehensible languages. Diversity, in this telling, is a curse. But the creators of the dance theater work "Babel (words)" have a sunnier view of cultural differences and the possibilities for cross cultural communication. This would be cheering, especially in this political moment, if only "Babel" were less dull. This 2010 work, which had its New York premiere on Wednesday night at the Rose Theater as part of Lincoln Center's White Light Festival, is itself a multicultural collaboration. Its two choreographers, Damien Jalet and Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui, come from linguistically opposed (French versus Flemish) segments of Belgium. Its dancers, representing 13 countries and speaking 20 languages and dialects, were selected for their diverse movement backgrounds: ballet, hip hop, contemporary. Its musicians hail from India, Italy and Japan. Instead of the tale from Genesis, "Babel" substitutes its own sweeter spoken fable about gesture as the original unifying language, lost but potentially recoverable. To this it adds neuroscience, sampling a TED Talk about mirror neurons the motor neurons that fire when you watch someone else move as the source of empathy, culture and civilization. All of those words set up some interesting propositions. It's the action that disappoints. There's beauty in the teamwork exhibited as the dancers continually rearrange the set pieces metal frames designed by the sculptor Antony Gormley into buildings, cities, a prison. And there's ingenuity in the coordination with which they merge their bodies into a leviathan. The main commonality, though, is unison to a beat, and even when the musicians are amping up the intensity with booming drums and spiritually soaring vocals, the gesturing too closely resembles the safety spiels of flight attendants. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
In less than a year, the coronavirus has killed more than 220,000 Americans. But even that staggering number downplays the true toll of the pandemic, according to a recent analysis. Every death represents years of potential life lost, years that might otherwise have been filled with rich memories of family, friends, productivity and joy trips to the grocery store, late night conversations on the phone, tearful firsts with a newborn baby. "Think of everything that a person does in a year," said Stephen Elledge, a geneticist at Harvard. "Who among us would not give anything to have one more year with a parent, a spouse, a son or daughter, a close friend?" In the new analysis, which has not yet been published in a peer reviewed scientific journal, Dr. Elledge added up those years. He tabulated the ages of Americans known to have died of Covid 19, and tallied the number of years they might have lived had they reached a typical life expectancy. His calculations show that the coronavirus has claimed more than 2.5 million years of potential life in the United States since the start of 2020. Nearly half of those years were taken from people under the age of 65. The numbers, Dr. Elledge said, magnify a dimension of the pandemic's toll that can't be captured by absolute deaths alone, and underscore the importance of taming the virus to protect everyone, regardless of age. "These are everyday people who are dying," said Dr. Utibe Essien, a physician and health equity researcher at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine who was not involved in the analysis. "They're losing time with their kids, their grandkids, their opportunities to build their futures." Dr. Essien was one of several experts who reviewed the study at the request of The New York Times. About 80 percent of the Americans who have died from the coronavirus were over 65. But younger people are still vulnerable to the worst effects of the virus, which, when they prove lethal, can cleave several decades from a life span. The report comes just days after scientists published a high profile and discredited declaration arguing that businesses and schools should be quickly opened and that people "who are not vulnerable" to the virus presumably the young and healthy should return to "life as normal" while older Americans remain cloistered from the coronavirus. Although older people account for most of the confirmed deaths related to the coronavirus, "that isn't the only way to look at it," Dr. Elledge said. Limited demographic data have been collected about coronavirus related deaths, which are challenging to accurately estimate, especially while the pandemic is still underway. But Dr. Elledge was able to put together a tally by pulling data from the C.D.C. website and actuarial records. (The C.D.C.'s total death estimates differ slightly from those of other organizations, including the frequently cited Covid Tracking Project.) Despite making up only one fifth of the total recorded deaths related to Covid 19, people under 65 accounted for nearly 1.2 million years of potential life that had been lost to the virus. Older people made up the remaining 1.4 million years in Dr. Elledge's count. Since January, the coronavirus has killed about 43,000 Americans under the age of 65, all of them too young to qualify for Medicare. Roughly 2,000 of them were younger than 35, and hundreds had not yet turned 25, too young even to legally rent a car. "This is humanizing," said Nadia Abuelezam, an epidemiologist at Boston College who was not involved in the analysis. "It makes it much more about how it could impact my lived experiences, my opportunities, my ability to be around the people I love." Still, life years is only one metric by which to measure loss, said Ayesha Mahmud, a health demographer and epidemiologist at the University of California, Berkeley, who was not involved in the analysis. Dr. Mahmud stressed the importance of not undervaluing the lives of older people simply because they might have fewer potential years left a mind set that can disadvantage older populations and minimize their disease burden. Several other researchers have published similar observations on the number of years of potential life eliminated by the pandemic. Every new analysis can serve as an important reminder of the staggering pace at which the coronavirus has torn through the nation, Dr. Mahmud said. "For me, what's striking is that this has happened in such a short period of time," she said. Even losses enumerated by life years do not represent the full costs exacted by the pandemic, said Maimuna Majumder, an epidemiologist at Boston Children's Hospital and Harvard Medical School who was not involved in the analysis. Researchers still do not fully understand the long term repercussions of a coronavirus infection, which can throw the body into flux for months, perhaps longer, often with debilitating symptoms. Deaths are also not distributed uniformly across the population. Age is certainly one factor that can influence an individual's risk. Dr. Elledge's analysis also showed that men, who tend to fare worse against the coronavirus, had lost more potential years of life than women. People with certain health conditions, including obesity, diabetes and heart disease, are also more likely to become seriously sick if they catch the virus. (Some of these underlying conditions can also reduce life expectancy; Dr. Elledge noted that his analysis was unable to account for this, and that the number of life years lost in certain cases might have been artificially inflated.) The pandemic has also had a disproportionate impact on Black, Latino, Indigenous and Native people, who are more likely to contract the coronavirus, and to become severely sick and die once an infection sets in. Roughly one in 920 Black Americans has died from the coronavirus, compared with one in 1,840 white Americans, according to one analysis. Another recent assessment found that the pandemic has more severely reduced life expectancies among Black and Latino populations, compared with their white neighbors. Black Americans already have lower life expectancies than white Americans. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
First order of business is Simon, who's been fomenting insurrection for the past few episodes and doesn't see Negan's surprise return as any reason to cancel his coup. Negan has spies everywhere, so of course he finds out, and the comeuppance hits as hard as would be expected. A scoundrel to the very end, Simon pulls a sucker punch on Negan, a shrewd move from the writers that sets up the audience for a perverse catharsis when Negan strangles the life out him. That leaves Dwight, a double agent in two sets of cross hairs. It turns out that Laura was the mystery passenger Negan scooped up at the close of last week's episode, and she gladly tattled on Dwight. Negan could deal with him like he dealt with Simon maybe bash in his skull, string him up as a zombified example and call it a day but he instead wisely uses the new information to his advantage. Dwight has more use to him as a conduit through which he can knowingly feed the coalition faction false intelligence, such as the phony battle plan map that Negan tricks him into delivering. The moment he outlives his usefulness, Dwight's life is almost assuredly over. But if the season finale next week deals a mortal blow to Negan, he might just escape in one piece. Maddening as such an outcome would be, Gregory just might be poised to come out on top when the dust settles after this season's finale. An expert at playing both sides against the middle, Gregory had allied himself both with Simon and Dwight. But now that Negan has come home to roost, Gregory will have to do what he does best and weasel out of a treacherous situation through deception, flattery, manipulation and a few well placed back stabbings. Regardless of whether Negan will hold him responsible for Dwight's or Simon's sins, Gregory is already formulating a contingency plan for his own backside. By the final scene's re declaration of war, the episode has cleared a path for a free for all brawl next week, as the show wraps for the season. The unwritten rules of combat in "The Walking Dead" suggest that whoever holds the most hate in their hearts will emerge on top when it comes to blows, giving the steadfastly hateful Negan a seeming edge. But Rick is motivated by the lingering pain of his son's death, a lasting hurt that seeps even deeper into his bones as he reads Carl's letter. Urban legends murmur about mothers who heave cars off their infants; the power of a parent cannot be underestimated. "The Walking Dead" has diverged from the comic books' mythology enough times that adherence to the source material can't be taken for granted, but trust that Rick will be out for blood when he and Negan meet next. They've set the terms of their rivalry, and in the fashion of the old Westerns, this town ain't big enough for the two of 'em. Someone must die. It's not what Carl would have wanted, but it's all that's left. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
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